Congress-led front wins a majority
What happened
Kerala's government changed hands again, and the winning front cleared a majority in its own right.
The Indian National Congress won 55 of the 140 seats — short of a majority on its own.
It governed instead through the UDF front — an alliance, a group of parties that team up to fight an election together, and share power afterward if they win enough seats between them — which crossed the majority mark with 60.7% of the seats.
The runner-up, Communist Party of India (Marxist), won 29 seats.
What changed
Turnout dropped noticeably from the previous election — the share of registered voters who actually cast a ballot came in lower this time.
It fell to 72.1%, down -7.8 pp percentage points from the election before.
13 of the CPM's seats moved straight to the INC, the single biggest shift of the election.
Notable numbers
A few numbers from that election stand out.
The closest race was at Kovalam, Keralam, decided by a margin of just 21 votes — how far ahead the winner finished, in votes, over whoever came second.
Malappuram, Keralam had the widest margin of the year, with the winner finishing 34.6% of the vote ahead of the runner-up.
About 83.6% of registered voters turned out to cast a ballot at Aroor, Keralam, the highest share of any seat that year.
Ettumanoor, Keralam drew the largest field of the election, with 16 candidates on the ballot.
The backdrop
This kept alive the back-and-forth between Kerala's two rival fronts.
Kerala's fragmented coalitions consolidated into two rival pre-poll alliances in the late 1970s: the Congress-led United Democratic Front, formed in 1979 by K. Karunakaran, and the Left Democratic Front, founded the same year by E. M. S. Namboodiripad and P. K. Vasudevan Nair. The LDF first contested as a bloc in 1980, winning power under E. K. Nayanar.