GE2025: Understand Your Candidate

A quick tool I built to help voters get to know their candidates — from manifesto promises to their track record in Parliament. Try here 🔗

The Problem

In my conversations with friends and colleagues leading up to GE2025, I realized a lack of political awareness among my peers. It wasn't that they were disinterested, but they just didn't seem to want to proactively find out more themselves. As I explored the problem, I found that:

• Newspapers were mostly comprehensive, but information was either scattered across articles, or too overwhelming for some
• Government sites either focused on electoral boundary changes like elections.data.gov.sg or served a basic function for one to query their constituency, such as from the ELD

For voters to know their choices, let alone make an informed one, I realised that there was probably a tiny opportunity for me to provide a visually-appealing (for a young audience) and centralised source of information. The primary goal was to lower the barrier to basic info that could be important in shaping one's choice.

Features

• Search for constituency via postal code
• View contesting parties and candidates, including candidate profile and background, parliamentary engagement, and manifesto summaries
• My main differentiation was to go beyond constituency lookup, but to provide info for one to build a basic understanding of their choice and serve as a springboard for their further exploration

Challenges

• Highly manual process to populate candidate information
  • Wrote a scraper for PAP’s site to auto-grab candidate picture links but couldn’t do the same for other parties due to lack of structured information
  • Had to input data quickly on Nomination Day as official info came in, but on hindsight speed was not meant to be my differentiator either way
• Distribution was purely through Reddit as no other channels seemed appropriate (garnered 4K+ site visits from 60K post impressions but fizzled out quickly)

Reflections

• Value proposition: Am I building something that truly adds value? My honest assessment is maybe; I think manifesto summmaries can be useful, but someone took it one step further brilliantly with a manifesto chatbot
• Distribution: Reddit seemed to be a good channel given its reach and user profile, but my real audience was probably not fully on Reddit too
• I learnt a lot more about our politics