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GE2025: Understand Your Candidate

GE2025: Understand Your Candidate

A site I built before Singapore's 2025 general election to help voters get to know their candidates. Try here 🔗

In my conversations with friends and colleagues leading up to GE2025, I noticed they weren't disinterested in politics, but they just didn't proactively dig. Newspapers had the information but it was scattered across many articles. Government sites were great for electoral boundaries or constituency lookups, but without further information on candidates.

I figured there was a tiny opportunity for a centralised, more readable source for a younger audience. Users could enter their postal code, find their constituency, view contesting parties and candidates, and read manifesto summaries. My main differentiation was to go beyond a constituency lookup, which every site had. I built a one-page profile per candidate, with manifesto summaries I generated by feeding the official PDFs into NotebookLM.

Outcomes

  • 4K visitors over 2 days (yes it died out real fast)
  • 95% upvote ratio and >100 shares from >200K views on Reddit
  • Average session ~1 min, hmm I'm not sure if people read the manifesto summaries

Screenshots

Electoral Map Electoral Map

Candidate profiles and manifesto summary per constituency Candidate profiles and manifesto summary per constituency

What I learned

  • Distribution matters. One Reddit post (3K+ visits) did almost all the work, and I had no other channel. Not every project is meant to be monetised or go viral, but I should've had a plan for what came after the Reddit traffic died.
  • I didn't really validate whether the audience I wanted to reach (the politically-uninformed) would even land on a Reddit post about politics. Probably not. The people who found it were already engaged.
  • The manifesto summary was the actual edge over a directory site. Another project (ge2025.vercel.app) took it one step further brilliantly with a manifesto chatbot 👏
  • Wrote a scraper for PAP's site to grab bios and photos. Couldn't do the same for the opposition because their sites had no structured info.
  • Manual data entry on Nomination Day was painful and very automatable.
  • I learnt a lot more about our politics!

Project link