CHENNAI — The Madras High Court intervened this week to prevent the Election Commission of India from holding byelections that could have left two people legally elected to the same seat at the same time.

The court stayed the notification of bypolls in five constituencies where petitions challenging the earlier results are still pending. Were such a petition to succeed after a replacement had already won, both candidates would hold a valid claim to a single seat, an outcome the court called anomalous and the Commission called its operational timeline. It is at least the fourth occasion in six decades that the courts have had to walk the Commission through the arithmetic of single-occupancy representation.

The five vacancies arose from resignations barely two months after the May 2026 Assembly elections, though the reasons for those resignations were not among the matters the court was asked to resolve. "We were proceeding to fill what we interpreted as a clear vacancy under Section 151A," an election official said, noting that the governing precedent had been on the books, and available for consultation, since 1967.

The parties whose candidates resigned welcomed the stay, which grants them until the end of the month to manage the narrative before any of the seats is contested again.