Election petitions under the Representation of the People Act, 1951 are a small, slow docket, not a graveyard of twelve thousand cases. When we filter the High Court records on eCourtsIndia for petitions that actually cite the Act, we find 442 records filed under the EP case type, 84 of them still shown as pending on 23 September 2026. Most of those pending matters were filed after the 2023 state elections and the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Of the petitions that have been decided, fewer than one in five finished inside the six months that Section 86(7) asks for.
Last updated: 23 September 2026
An earlier version of this post reported 40,453 election petitions and 11,967 pending. Those numbers were wrong, and this rewrite explains why. The short version: the case-type code “EP” is shared. In several High Courts it is mainly used for Execution Petitions, the proceedings that enforce a decree or award, and those dwarf the handful of true election petitions. Counting the code instead of the cases produced a figure that had very little to do with elections.
Key takeaways
- The EP case type holds 42,135 High Court records, but most are execution petitions. Madras alone has 16,591 EP records, and only 5 of them mention the Representation of the People Act.
- Filtering for the Act gives 442 EP-coded election petitions, 84 pending (23 September 2026). About 130 more election-related records sit under an unmapped case-type code, mostly at the Manipur High Court.
- Of 345 decided petitions with a recorded duration, 61 (18 percent) were decided within six months and 151 (44 percent) took more than three years.
- The pending pile is young: 52 of the 84 pending petitions were filed in 2024 or 2025.
- Every figure here can be re-run for free on eCourtsIndia search. The exact filters are listed in the methodology section.
What an election petition is
An election petition is the only legal route to challenge the result of a Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha, Legislative Assembly or Legislative Council election in India. Section 80 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 says no such election can be called in question except by an election petition. Section 80A gives the High Court jurisdiction to try it, normally before a single judge assigned by the Chief Justice.
The time limits are tight at the front end. Under Section 81, any candidate or elector can present a petition within 45 days of the date of election of the returned candidate. The grounds are set out in Sections 100 and 101: corrupt practices, improper acceptance or rejection of a nomination, improper reception or refusal of votes, and non-compliance with the Constitution, the Act or the rules where it materially affected the result.
The back end is looser. Section 86(7) says every election petition “shall be tried as expeditiously as possible” and that an endeavour “shall be made to conclude the trial within six months” from the date it is presented to the High Court. It is a direction to try, not a deadline that ends the case. Appeals from the High Court’s decision go to the Supreme Court under Section 116A. You can read the full text of Section 86 and Section 81 on IndiaCode.
Elections to cooperative societies, municipalities, panchayats and universities are challenged under their own statutes, usually before other forums. Those disputes are not election petitions under the 1951 Act and are outside this analysis.
Why “EP” is not the same as election petition
Every case in the eCourts system carries a case-type code, and the codes come from each High Court’s own registry. “EP” is used by some courts for election petitions and by others, especially on the Original Side of the older chartered High Courts, for execution petitions. The two have nothing in common except the abbreviation. Our case type encyclopedia explains how these codes are mapped and why the same letters can mean different things in different courts.
The records make the difference easy to see. A typical Madras High Court record in the EP bucket, EP 1517/2009, was listed before an Assistant Registrar on the Original Side and closed within the year, the pattern of an execution proceeding. A genuine Madras election petition, by contrast, carries an “ELP” label on the court record: ELP 2/2016, M. Appavu v. I.S. Inbadurai, filed in June 2016 after that year’s Tamil Nadu assembly election and listed before a judge of the High Court.
| High Court bench | All records coded EP | EP records citing the RP Act |
|---|---|---|
| Madras, Chennai (HCMA01) | 16,591 | 5 |
| Bombay, Mumbai (HCBM02) | 10,914 | 117 |
| Calcutta, Original Side (WBCHCO) | 10,811 | 4 |
| Bombay, Aurangabad (HCBM03) | 994 | 21 |
| Madhya Pradesh, Jabalpur (MPHC01) | 454 | 14 |
| All High Courts | 42,135 (12,441 pending) | 442 (84 pending) |
The three largest EP dockets, Madras, Bombay’s Original Side and Calcutta’s Original Side, hold more than 38,000 records between them, yet only 126 of those mention the Act. That is the error the old headline made. It counted execution proceedings in three commercial courts and called them unresolved election challenges.
How we rebuilt the count
We kept the EP case type but required the record to mention “Representation of the People” somewhere in its indexed text, which includes the order and judgment text. That returned 442 High Court records. We then looked for election petitions filed under other codes by running “Representation of the People” AND “election petition” across all High Court case types. The biggest buckets were writ petitions (about 1,070), which are mostly pre-poll and procedural challenges rather than election petitions, followed by the 442 EP records and 131 records with an unmapped case type. Of those 131, 85 are at the Manipur High Court and 48 were filed in 2022, the year of the Manipur assembly election, which suggests that court’s election petitions are registered under a code our mapping does not yet recognise.
Two caveats. First, the text filter only finds a record if the Act is named in something we have indexed, so a freshly filed petition with no order yet may be missed. Second, an EP record that mentions the Act in passing could still be something else. We treat 442 as a close, conservative count of EP-coded election petitions, not an exact census. Gujarat also registers related election-officer applications under an “EA” code; we left those out because they are ancillary to a petition, not petitions themselves.
Where the election petitions are
| High Court bench | EP records citing the RP Act | Shown as pending |
|---|---|---|
| Bombay, Mumbai | 117 | 17 |
| Gujarat | 72 | 15 |
| Telangana | 38 | 2 |
| Orissa | 28 | 16 |
| Bombay, Aurangabad | 21 | 6 |
| Karnataka, Bengaluru | 16 | 1 |
| Uttarakhand | 16 | 1 |
| Himachal Pradesh | 15 | 7 |
| Punjab and Haryana | 15 | 0 |
| Andhra Pradesh | 14 | 7 |
| Madhya Pradesh, Jabalpur | 14 | 0 |
| Rajasthan, Jodhpur | 12 | 1 |
| Allahabad | 10 | 2 |
By state, Maharashtra leads with 140 records across its benches, followed by Gujarat (72), Telangana (38), Odisha (28) and Karnataka (24). The distribution follows two things: how many seats a state has, and how consistently its High Court uses the EP code for election petitions. A state missing from this table has not necessarily had fewer challenges. Records from Delhi, Kerala, Jharkhand and Bihar that mention the Act appear under other case-type codes instead.
Orissa stands out on pendency. Sixteen of its 28 petitions are shown as pending, the highest share among the larger benches, and all sixteen were filed in 2024, the year Odisha held its Lok Sabha and assembly elections together.
Filings follow the election calendar
| Filing year | EP records citing the RP Act | Still shown as pending | Elections in the preceding months |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2004 | 15 | 1 | Lok Sabha and several assemblies |
| 2009 | 41 | 0 | Lok Sabha |
| 2014 | 50 | 1 | Lok Sabha |
| 2018 | 33 | 1 | Gujarat, Himachal and other assemblies |
| 2019 | 75 | 8 | Lok Sabha and assemblies |
| 2023 | 29 | 13 | Gujarat, Himachal, Karnataka and others |
| 2024 | 55 | 32 | Lok Sabha and state assemblies |
| 2025 | 24 | 20 | Late-2024 and early-2025 assembly polls |
The pattern is what you would expect from a 45-day filing window: petitions arrive in waves a few weeks after each round of results, and almost nothing in between. The 2019 wave is the largest in the data. It includes a cluster of Gujarat High Court petitions filed in the first week of August 2019, several of which were disposed of on the same day in September 2019.
How long they take
Of the 358 decided EP-coded election petitions, 345 have both a filing date and a decision date. Measured from filing to decision:
- 61 (18 percent) were decided within about six months, the window Section 86(7) asks courts to aim for.
- 151 (44 percent) took more than three years.
- The rest, roughly 38 percent, took between six months and three years.
The quick group includes petitions that ended at an early stage, like the August 2019 Gujarat cluster decided within about six weeks. A petition that goes to full trial on corrupt practices is a different animal: pleadings, framing of issues, witness evidence and arguments before a single judge who also carries a regular list. At the far end, some petitions in the data ran for more than a decade before a final decision. For how these durations compare with other kinds of litigation, see the Indian Disposal-Time Index.
Duration matters more here than in almost any other kind of case. A Lok Sabha or assembly term is five years. A petition that takes longer than that can only produce a declaration about a seat that has already been contested again, which is why the three-year-plus share deserves attention even though the absolute numbers are small.
The pending docket
The 84 EP-coded election petitions shown as pending are mostly recent. By filing year: 32 from 2024, 20 from 2025, 13 from 2023, 8 from 2019 and the remainder spread across older years. Most of the 2024 and 2025 petitions follow the 2024 Lok Sabha election and the state polls held alongside or after it, so they are still within a normal trial timeline.
The older pending records are where the questions lie, though they also need care, because a court’s register is not always updated the day a matter ends. A few examples, as last recorded in the index:
- EP 10/2019 at the Bombay High Court’s Nagpur Bench, filed on 5 July 2019 by Nana Falgunarao Patole against Nitin Jairam Gadkari after the 2019 Lok Sabha election. The record shows it as pending, listed for orders, with the last recorded hearing on 18 December 2024.
- EP 29/2019 at the Telangana High Court, Bandi Sanjay Kumar v. Gangula Kamalakar, filed on 23 January 2019 after the December 2018 assembly election. The record shows it as pending at the evidence stage, with the last recorded hearing on 25 June 2025.
- ELP 2/2016 at the Madras High Court, M. Appavu v. I.S. Inbadurai, filed on 29 June 2016. The index shows it as pending for direction, with the last hearing it records on 3 October 2019.
These are statements about what the court record shows, not findings about the merits or about anyone’s conduct. If you rely on a status, open the case page and refresh it, which pulls the latest entry from the court’s own server. The case status dictionary explains what each status label means.
Why petitions run long
The Act itself explains part of it. A petition alleging a corrupt practice has to plead full particulars, and Section 86(5) bars new particulars being added later, so the preliminary fight over whether the pleadings are good enough can take months on its own. Section 86(6) asks for day-to-day trial once evidence begins, but the same single judge usually has a full regular list. Interim orders on recounts, inspection of ballots or EVM records, and maintainability can each go up to the Supreme Court before the trial moves again.
None of this is unique to election law. What is unusual is that the remedy loses value with every year that passes, because the term of the seat in dispute is fixed. That is the real argument for treating Section 86(7) seriously, and it holds whether the pending count is 84 or eight hundred.
How to track an election petition yourself
- Search by party name. Put the candidate’s or returned member’s name into the litigant search and filter to the High Court of the state. The litigant search guide explains spelling variants and party roles.
- Do not rely on the EP code alone. Add the words “Representation of the People” to a full-text case search, or check the case title and bench, to separate election petitions from execution petitions.
- Refresh before you publish. Open the case page and refresh it so the status and next date come straight from the court record. For a petition you want to follow, turn on WhatsApp or email alerts so each new order reaches you.
Developers and newsrooms can run the same filters at scale through the eCourtsIndia API, which also exposes a separate electoral-roll search for checking voter-list questions that sometimes arise in these cases. For another data story where the headline number needed careful filtering, see PMLA bail by the numbers.
Methodology
All figures were pulled from the eCourtsIndia index on 23 September 2026 using the case search (the same queries run on the website, the API and the MCP server). EP bucket: case type EP, court level High Court, no text filter (42,135 records, 12,441 pending). Election petitions: case type EP, court level High Court, full-text query “Representation of the People” (442 records; 358 disposed, 84 pending), with court, state, filing-year and status facets. Other codes: court level High Court, query “Representation of the People” AND “election petition”, faceted by case type. Durations: the same EP filter restricted to disposed cases, split by case duration in days (up to 183, and more than 1,095). Sample cases were opened individually to confirm bench, parties and dates. Pending status reflects the court record as indexed and may lag the court’s own register.
We have also flagged the shared EP code to our data team so that election petitions and execution petitions can be told apart in the case-type filter itself.
Further reading: 498A by the Numbers, The Conglomerate Litigation Map, Litigation Portfolio Monitoring for General Counsel.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the six-month rule under Section 86(7) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951?
Section 86(7) says every election petition shall be tried as expeditiously as possible and that an endeavour shall be made to conclude the trial within six months of its presentation to the High Court. It is a direction, not a hard deadline. In our data only 18 percent of decided petitions met it. Read the section on IndiaCode.
How many election petitions are pending in India’s High Courts?
Filtering EP-coded High Court records for the Representation of the People Act gives 442 election petitions, of which 84 were shown as pending on 23 September 2026. Most pending petitions were filed in 2024 or 2025. A few more sit under other case-type codes. You can re-run the filter on eCourtsIndia search.
Why does the EP case type show more than 42,000 records?
Because EP is shared. Several High Courts, including Madras and the Original Sides of Bombay and Calcutta, use EP mainly for execution petitions that enforce decrees. Madras has 16,591 EP records but only 5 mention the Representation of the People Act. The case type encyclopedia explains how these codes are mapped.
Where must an election petition be filed and within what time limit?
Under Section 80A the High Court of the state where the election was held tries the petition, normally through a judge assigned by the Chief Justice. Section 81 requires a candidate or elector to present it within 45 days from the date of election of the returned candidate. To trace a specific petition or its parties, use the eCourtsIndia litigant search.
How can journalists track election petitions against sitting MPs or MLAs?
Search the member’s name in the litigant search, filter to the state’s High Court, and confirm it is an election petition by checking for the Representation of the People Act rather than trusting the EP code. Refresh the case page before publishing a status. The litigant search guide covers spelling variants and party roles.