On May 16th, 2009, the Election Commission of India announced the results of its recent month-long India-wide election for their lower house of Parliament - the largest democratic election in the world. An estimated 714 million voters (from a population of 1.2 billion) were eligible to cast their vote in one of five separate phases at over 800,000 polling stations, starting on April 16th. Logistically difficult, massive in scale, and opposed by various rebel groups, separatists and protestors, the elections still managed to be held with minimal disruption, with an average voter turnout of greater than 56%. The big winner was the the Indian National Congress party, which will form the new government under the incumbent prime minister Manmohan Singh. As with any photo story from India, it is impossible to capture every aspect in just a handful of pictures - collected here are only some of the scenes that played out across the nation over the last month. ( 40 photos total