Chennai: Former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and DMK president M.K. Stalin has moved the Madras High Court challenging the post-election verification of electronic voting machines (EVMs) in Kolathur, the constituency where his defeat in the Assembly elections four months ago emerged as one of the defining moments of the previous government's electoral collapse.
Stalin, who lost to Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) candidate V.S. Babu by 8,795 votes, has urged the court to order a 100 per cent count of VVPAT slips and the checking and verification of all 286 EVM sets used in the constituency. He has also sought to have Babu's election declared void and, consequently, himself declared the returned candidate.
However, Stalin's petition centres on a narrower and technically complex challenge. He has argued that the post-result checking and verification process, conducted under procedures framed by the Election Commission following Supreme Court directions, revealed several malfunctions and irregularities but was nevertheless certified by election authorities as having been “successfully completed”.
After finishing second in Kolathur, Stalin applied on May 7 for verification of 14 EVM sets, representing 5 per cent of the constituency's 286 polling stations. The exercise began only on July 29, nearly three months later. The petition says the delay caused “serious and irreversible prejudice” to his legal rights.
According to the affidavit, a VVPAT at polling station 28 stopped functioning during a fresh mock poll after 12 votes and displayed Error 2.7. Another VVPAT at polling station 75 also failed during the verification exercise.
At polling station 157, the carrying cases of the ballot and control units allegedly had blank address tags, with the seals placed differently from those on other machines. At polling station 79, the serial numbers on ballot units allegedly did not match the address tags.
The affidavit describes another incident at polling station 208 as particularly serious. During verification on August 5, a ballot unit carrying Stalin's name was, according to the petition, not detected by the Control Unit. His representative immediately recorded an objection.
Despite this, the District Election Officer certified on the same day that the checking and verification had been successfully completed in accordance with the prescribed procedures.
Stalin's case is not limited to allegations of machine malfunction. He has argued that the authorities failed to provide specific technical reports explaining the malfunctions and instead offered replacement machines in some instances.
His representative had also sought 18 technical clarifications regarding the verification procedure. The affidavit says these questions went unanswered. The petition argues that replacing a machine under examination cannot resolve questions concerning the integrity of that particular machine.
The affidavit also presents a statistical argument. At the five polling stations where defects, failures or chain-of-custody issues were recorded, Stalin received 29.87 per cent of the vote, compared with 40.74 per cent across the other 281 polling stations.
Babu's vote share moved almost exactly in the opposite direction, with 55.97 per cent at the five affected polling stations against 45.08 per cent elsewhere. The combined vote share of the other 33 candidates, meanwhile, remained virtually unchanged.
The petition, however, stops short of claiming that votes were actually transferred or misrecorded. It states that the results are consistent with such a possibility but could also be explained by those polling stations simply having voted differently.
Stalin has argued that the incomplete verification means there is no way to distinguish between the two possibilities. Of the 286 polling stations in the constituency, only 14 were examined, and irregularities were recorded in five of them, accounting for 35.71 per cent of the inspected sample.
The distinction is politically significant. Stalin had represented Kolathur since 2011 through successive political cycles and entered the recent election not merely as a candidate but as the incumbent Chief Minister and the central figure of the DMK government.