Still no majority, as seats keep changing hands
What happened
Congress won the most seats again, still short of a majority.
The Indian National Congress won 118 of the 318 seats.
That left it short of the 160 seats needed for a majority — another hung house, where no single party wins enough seats to govern alone.
Its closest rival, the Samyukta Socialist Party, won 52 seats.
What changed
A lot of seats changed hands again, even though the overall result looked similar to before.
213 of the 318 constituencies elected a different party than they had at the last election.
The single biggest shift ran from the SSP to the INC, which picked up 30 of those seats.
Notable numbers
A few numbers from that count stand out.
The closest race: Maheshpur, Bihar was decided by just 37 votes — the narrowest margin, how far ahead the winner finished, in votes, over whoever came second, of any seat that year.
At the other extreme, Majhgaon, Bihar had the widest margin of the election, with 56.8% of the vote separating the winner from the runner-up — measured as a share of the vote rather than in votes.
Turnout — the share of registered voters who actually cast a ballot — was highest in Paru, Bihar, where 76.7% of registered voters turned out.
Nawada, Bihar was the state's biggest constituency by registered voters, with 1,20,659 names on the electoral roll.
The backdrop
Congress again fell short of a majority, repeating the pattern from the previous election.
This kept the same party ahead of the field, without a change of government.