A fourth straight win, in a more crowded field
What happened
Indian National Congress won again, but its position kept slipping.
The INC won 18 of the 40 seats — short of the 21-seat majority mark, a hung house, a result where no single party wins enough seats to govern alone.
Its nearest rival, the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak, won 12 seats.
What changed
INC's winning streak kept extending, even as new competitors began breaking into the assembly for the first time.
This was the party's 4th straight win here.
The field also grew more crowded, with 5 parties splitting the seats between them.
Notable numbers
A few numbers from that election stand out.
The tightest race was Taleigao, Goa, decided by a margin — how far ahead the winner finished, in votes, over whoever came second — of just 72 votes.
Poinguinim, Goa posted the best turnout of any seat — the share of registered voters who actually cast a ballot — at 80.0%.
State-wide turnout also reached a new high, with about 70.0% of registered voters casting a ballot.
Mormugao, Goa was the state's biggest electorate this time, with 30,235 registered voters.
The backdrop
The years between elections were politically turbulent, with the governing coalition changing hands multiple times before voters went back to the polls.
After three decades of stable governance, Goa entered a period of chronic political instability: between 1990 and 2005 the state had fourteen different governments in fifteen years, amid frequent legislator defections and mergers between parties under the Tenth Schedule's anti-defection provisions.