Counting of votes for the 6 October bypolls began on the morning of 9 October across Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, West Bengal and Assam, and the early trends are mixed for Tamil Nadu’s ruling party. In Tamil Nadu the two seats at stake are Madurantakam in Chengalpattu district and Dharapuram in Tiruppur district, both reserved constituencies that the AIADMK won in the April assembly election. The contest is widely read as the first real test of Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay’s TVK since it took power in May. In the opening rounds TVK looked to have the advantage in both seats, but the picture changed as counting progressed. In Madurantakam, TVK’s Maragatham Kumaravel led after the second round with 7,615 votes, ahead of the DMK’s I.
Paranthamen on 6,008. In Dharapuram the AIADMK’s K. Banumathi first edged ahead by just five votes and then built a lead, polling 13,213 votes after four rounds against 12,489 for TVK’s P. Sathyabama, with the DMK’s S. Suganya on 11,554. If that trend holds, the AIADMK would retain a seat it held and the DMK would be pushed into third place in at least one of the two contests.
Counting-day friction was also reported, with an independent candidate in Madurantakam alleging that an electronic voting machine control unit malfunctioned at one booth and complaining that his request to bring down the VVPAT was ignored. In neighbouring Puducherry, the AINRC’s Ashok Anand, backed by the BJP and AIADMK, built a lead of more than 10,000 votes in Thattanchavady over Congress’s E. Vinayagam. In West Bengal, the BJP led in both Nandigram and Rejinagar, the first electoral check on the BJP government that replaced the TMC after fifteen years, while in Assam the BJP led comfortably in the Nagaon Lok Sabha seat. Final results and margins were not yet declared at the time of writing, so the Tamil Nadu outcome could still shift.