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till confused about which party to vote for on Wednesday? Still not sure if your vote will really make a difference to the way the country is governed over the next five years? Have you completely lost faith in political parties?

You'€™re in good company.

With two days before polling day, millions of people are still unsure about which party to vote for. The way the 12 national parties have waged their campaigns has only reinforced people'€™s conviction that they cannot be trusted. Yet, we'€™re stuck with them.

Do not lose faith in democracy, not just yet. Doing so would be to squander all the gains we have fought for in the last 16 years since we began this march toward democracy.

Here is a simple proposition that will truly make your vote count for Indonesia and help make democracy work for you: Give your votes to candidates in your district. Don'€™t give them to the political parties.

By voting for the right candidates, you can still make a difference.

 We have given too much power to political parties and, more specifically, to the oligarchs who now practically have full control over them. These party bosses call all the shots, including the way the candidates are selected, who gets to sit in the House of Representatives or the Provincial and Regional Legislative Councils (DPRDs), and they even have the power to remove representatives who are popularly elected.

When these elected representatives begin their work in October, they will represent first and foremost their respective political parties (and the political and business interests of their party bosses). There is no doubt where their loyalties lie; it is not with the people who put them there.

By voting for representatives, and then monitoring their activities and keeping them accountable throughout the next five years, we will send a strong message to the oligarchs that we will not let them off easily for taking away the sovereignty from our hands.

We can be pessimistic about the parties, but there are some good candidates (maybe not a whole lot) among those running for the national and local legislatures. The challenge is to find the ones with good characters and integrity.

The next question is how to choose them. It'€™s not as complicated as it sounds, thanks to the Internet.

I will be voting in the South Jakarta district, which will send seven representatives to the 560-seat House. The 12 parties are fielding 83 candidates. Their names, party affiliations and backgrounds are listed on the General Elections Commission (KPU) website, kpu.go.id.

I came across two names of people I know personally, if not professionally. They are a little on the old side beyond their 60s, and representing the wrong parties. But I know they are decent people. So, one of them may just win my vote.

I had earlier planned to give my vote to a younger, woman candidate, since gender and generation are two criteria in my selection.

I came across Camelia Panduwinata Lubis, thinking that she would be like the other decent and well-known figures with the name Lubis (including a respected journalist and a staunch human rights lawyer). But after searching her name on Google, I learned that she was a dangdut singer with the stage name, Camelia Petir ('€œlightening'€ in English), and that she had appeared semi-nude in a photo-modeling shoot. She should stick to doing what she'€™s best at: entertaining people, not representing them.

Also off my short list are the four incumbents vying for my vote. They have done absolutely nothing that I know of. I doubt that people in South Jakarta know them either; in fact, I doubt that these incumbents ever cared, except around election time.

I still have two more days to research and learn a little more about the candidates before making my mind up.

The same process can be applied in electing the representatives for the DPRDs; perhaps just a little longer because there are more candidates. But the same principle applies: Vote for your representatives.

Don'€™t give your vote to incumbents unless you really know that they have worked for you. Don'€™t give your vote to the candidate at the top of the party list either because most likely, they are the first choices of the party bosses due to their loyalty or their money.

Formappi, the Indonesian Parliament Watch, released at the weekend a report that confirmed what we had suspected all along about the performance of the current crop of representatives in serving the people: More than 83 percent received poor and very poor ratings based on attendance, statements they made and visits to their constituents. Only 5.6 percent of the current House representatives received good marks.

Tragically, 90 percent of these incumbents are running again in spite of their poor records, and many of them are being given priority over other candidates in the same parties.

That is all the more reason why we should be voting for candidates rather than parties and deprive the party bosses of some of their power to promote their first-choice candidates.

 Even if your candidates don'€™t go on to win the election, you should still make a point of monitoring the activities of the representatives who win in your district, and make sure that for the next five years they work for you and not for their parties.

The only way to beat the oligarchs at their own game is by building a closer connection with the representatives from your district, irrespective of their parties or whether you voted for them. Once elected, they are our representatives and they should work for us.

The Internet has made it easy for people to find out who represents them at the House and the DPRDs. And if they have their own social media accounts on, say, Twitter or Facebook, it makes it even easier for us to interact with them.

The mainstream media can help by starting to identify House members by their district or province first and, second, the parties they represent in reporting their activities. The current tradition of identifying them by the commission on which they sit and the parties they represent don'€™t help people monitor their representatives.

These elected politicians represent the district or province that sent them there, and identifying their constituencies would go a long way to making them better connected with their constituents and, therefore, more accountable to the people.

For better or for worse, we are stuck with a political system that gives too much power and authority to the political parties and the political oligarchs, who have learned that the way to control the system is by seizing control over the big parties.

Yes, we get the leaders that we deserve.

But this does not mean that we have to cede control to the political parties. On April 9, we have the opportunity to reclaim some of our sovereignty.