Yet, it is important that we do not forget. We must not forget the promises made by the parties, and we must not forget the successes and failures of the various parties on the ground.
We must create a record of the actions of the parties and the candidates. Parliamentary records must be archived and referenced. Votes on bills must be searchable.
Pulling up a politician's record should be a piece of cake, whether he/she is in parliament or not. Only with a good memory will we be able to gauge whether promises made are empty, what the circumstances under which a failure to fulfill promises were and so on. With this, by the next election, we will be prepared to decide with certainty who to give the mandate to.
I attempted to, albeit a bit too late, push out a tool for making more rational voting decisions using a reasonable methodology for "multi-criteria decision making", so voters could be facilitated in balancing track record, pork, and how they are represented on issues. (http://vote.individualpreference.info/ was launched just after Nomination Day. It also tried to push out approval voting, which provides a better gauge of the mandate any candidate has to represent the public.)
It turns out that the "Candidate Notes" feature of the site (part of "Candidate Evaluation") would be a useful thing to expand. Having a record of a politician's position on matters and what he/she has done would be tremendously valuable. Knowing that their actions will be tracked will keep politicians on their toes.
I propose we all, as a community of Singaporeans, work together to make this a reality. A robust system of records of our political history (complete with a local archive of public documents).
We need a political memory. We need it to be reliable and authoritative (hence the documents).
If you'd like to form a group. Contact me. Let's do this together.
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