That has nothing to do with this case. Here, there was a law of the realm that Lords who lost their positions in war were required to be reappointed to them. A Lord lost his position, a new Lord was elected, the old Lord was released from prison, and Erik not only demanded that the new Lord step down, he threatened to run for Judge just so he could ban the new Lord if he didn't step down. There was no battle between factions
I cannot fathom how one could think the placeholder rule could reasonably be applied to straightforward power plays, especially with regard to the ruler position.
Run for election means campaigning against someone who already holds the position and apparently disagrees with his intent. There's a power play in itself, there.
Giving a duke the ability to remove lords is something that has, to my knowledge, been seen favorably by the devs for some time, now (if a proper way of doing it can be thought of).
The character in question was not, from what I can tell, stripped of his lordship. The duke complained... that's it. The character can join another duchy if he wants. If the duke does manage to somehow ban the character, that character can bring the region with him to another realm.
I have a hard time seeing this as anything else than a power struggle. Someone in power who disagrees with the votes of others. It's not as if the duke went out to appoint someone "until the proper lord comes back", just to cancel the election. That the realm had a law or not on the topic seems irrelevant to me, because nobody agreed to place someone temporarily, nor did anyone seek to do so. It is hard to see this as a case of a placeholder, when no one was put in place specifically to hold the seat for someone else.
If the intent of the rule is to make game elections binding, then the rule needs to be rewritten to state as much. But that would be stepping into dangerous grounds, because many power struggles and aspects of politics revolve around disagreements over election results.
