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.
There's no factionalism here, no disagreement over politics. The only disagreement is over who should actually have that title—there's nothing larger behind it.
You're trying to make this out to be some kind of conflict between different political factions in the realm, with the lordship as part of the battleground between them, but so far as I can tell, it's absolutely nothing of the sort.
So far as Erik, the character, was concerned, the lordship was rightfully Rhiannon's because Sirion law and/or tradition stated that a Lord who lost their Lordship through capture in battle would have it returned. Eldarion was elected when the automatic referendum finished, and was in the way of Rhiannon being reappointed. That's literally all there was to it.
This wasn't a power struggle. As I said earlier, if there had been any evidence that it was, the Titans' considerations would have been somewhat different, though there's no guarantee the result wouldn't have been the same.
