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GE2025: Understand Your Candidate

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 gathered the following insights:

  • Newspapers had scattered information that was either too disorganised, or too overwhelming for some
  • Government sites were laser focused on solving specific problems - either focused on communicating electoral boundary changes (example 1) or to serve as constituency lookups without further information on candidates (example 2)

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 information 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 information for one to build a basic understanding of their choice and serve as a springboard for their further exploration

Screenshots

Electoral Map Electoral Map

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

Outcomes

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

Challenges

  • Patching together data (e.g. electoral boundary coordinates, map layers)
  • Wrote a scraper for PAP’s site to auto-grab profile pics and bios; couldn’t do the same for other parties due to lack of structured information
  • Highly manual process of inputting data on Nomination Day as official info came in - definitely possible to automate!

Reflections

  • Distribution is so important - while my Reddit post generated 3K+ site visits, I didn't really have any other channels. At the same time, not every product is meant to be monetised or achieve virality - this was perhaps something I was too fixated on, but I'm grateful for the good user feedback
  • Value proposition 1 - do my users really need this? I started out wanting to reach the less politically-informed, but my Reddit audience is perhaps more informed than the average Singapore anyway
  • Value proposition 2- what extra value am I bringing, other than a nice UI and some extra text information? I figured manifesto summaries was an edge and something genuinely useful. To save cost, I chose to generate the summaries myself by uploading manifestos to NotebookLM before hardcoding them into the page. However, another project https://ge2025.vercel.app/ took it one step further brilliantly with a manifesto chatbot 👏
  • I learnt a lot more about our politics!

Possible Improvements

  • Track parliamentary participation, topics
  • Digestable information about parliamentary discussions and policies

Links

Project link