I GOOGLED the definition of the word "hybrid" and found the following:

– an offspring of two animals or plants of different subspecies, breeds, varieties, species or genera

– a person whose background is a blend of two diverse cultures or traditions

– something heterogenous in origin or composition

Today, the word is used more loosely to mean any combination of two or more diverse alternatives, e.g., hybrid computers (analog and digital), hybrid vehicles (combustion engine and electric), hybrid meetings (face-to-face and online), and yes, hybrid election systems (manual and automated).

Hybrids are resorted to because they allow the user to take advantage of most, if not all, the good features of the alternatives.

And so today, politicians, media and even ordinary people are starting to talk about the "hybrid election system." But I'm getting ahead of myself. To understand this system better, it is best to start from what it was in the beginning.

Postwar elections in the Philippines started in 1946, when a purely manual election system was used, such a system being unchanged for many decades. The following is a brief description of how it was run:

– Voters filled up their ballots by hand, and cast the ballots themselves, by inserting them into the sealed ballot box;

– After the voting period, the BEI (board of election inspectors) tabulated the votes manually and physically transported the results (election returns or ERs) to the C/MBOC (city/municipality board of canvassers);

– The C/MBOC tabulated the ERs manually, physically transported the results (certificate of canvass, or COC) to the PBOC (provincial BoC);

– The PBOC tabulated the COCs manually, physically transported the results (provincial COC) to Congress and the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, for the final tabulation of the senatorial and party-list votes and presidential/vice-presidential votes, respectively.

Good points: This process, referred to as the "ladderized" system, for obvious reasons, had the significant feature of being very transparent. All the steps in the system were witnessed and fully understood by the voters.

Bad points: However, there was a very serious problem. Because all the steps were done manually, the process was therefore very slow. Even as the precinct activities, including the counting and preparation of the election returns, would only take at most, a day, the physical transport of results from the precincts to the canvassing points and the three-level canvassing steps, would take anywhere from four to six weeks.

To speed up the process, a law was passed in 1997, Republic Act 9369, automating the election system. Among its provisions are:

– It authorizes the Commission on Elections to use an automated election system that "encourages transparency, credibility, fairness and accuracy of elections."

– It further declares that "it is the policy of the State to ensure free, orderly, honest, peaceful, credible and informed elections ... which shall involve the use of an automated election system that will ensure ... that the process shall be transparent and credible and that the results shall be fast, accurate and reflective of the genuine will of the people" (emphasis mine).

– On Election Day, the voters shaded their candidate choices in the ballots, fed the ballots into the black box — the vote counting machine — then at 7 p.m., the VCM tabulated the votes, printed out the results and distributed copies according to law.

– The results are electronically transmitted to the three-level canvassing points where they are further tabulated to arrive at the city/municipality, provincial and national results.

– However, this system was not implemented until after the 2007 elections. It was first used in the 2008 ARMM elections and nationally, in the 2010 elections.

Good points: In the past five elections, from 2010 to 2022, which all used the Smartmatic VCMs, results were produced almost instantaneously — and the throughput (total) time was less than a week. The results were assumed to be accurate. There were very few protests filed, if at all. The Commission on Elections was happy with it and they appeared to trust its results.

Bad points: None of the voters witnessed the counting of the votes. If the VCM and its software, which was developed (originally, at least) by foreigners, were tinkered with and manipulated, the voters wouldn't know. The system practically "killed" the protest process because of the difficulty in spotting (automated) fraud, if any. The book, Code Red, supports this position; it says, "Unobservable vote-counting is inherently insane."

Strong doubt has been expressed by voters who could not believe that Marcos Jr. could double his votes in six years, yet leave the votes of his opponent, Robredo, practically unchanged.

Some IT practitioners who are familiar with election systems were not happy and were adamant in trusting the results. Or, even if they could trust the past elections' results, they worry that it might lead to complacency about future ones, which can then be taken advantage of, by unscrupulous candidates and election officials.

Analyzing the decision more deeply, it makes one wonder why the Comelec spent some P10 billion to automate the precinct activities which, when it was manually done, only took five to 12 hours, anyway (24 hours, in extreme cases). The automation of the canvassing system must have cost them only about P300 million, but it saved them more than 30 days.

And one item that the Comelec may have failed to realize — and still fails to realize — was that the system used, while fast, was not compliant with one very important requirement in elections: that of transparency, which, in effect, weakened the credibility of the results. It is, after all, transparency that makes election results unassailable.

In addition, the Comelec may have failed to realize that with the system they used, the voters lost their right to witness the counting of their votes. And chances are many did not understand how those VCMs counted their votes.

There are examples of countries that automated their elections, then after a few years, reverted to the manual system:

In Germany, political scientist Joachim Wiesner and son Ulrich Wiesner complained that push button voting was not transparent because the voter could not see what actually happened to his vote inside the computer and was required to place "blind faith" in the technology. In addition, the two plaintiffs argued that the results were open to manipulation. The German Supreme Court eventually ruled the voting machines unconstitutional.

I understand that it was also in Germany that the slogan, "Secret voting, public counting" originated.

Ireland bought voting machines from the Dutch company Nedap for about 40 million euros. The machines were used on a "pilot" basis in three constituencies for the 2002 Irish general election and a referendum on the Treaty of Nice. On April 23, 2009, the Minister for the Environment John Gormley announced that the electronic voting system was to be scrapped by an as yet undetermined method due to cost and the public's dissatisfaction with the current system.

The Netherlands: In 2008, e-voting was suspended after 20 years of use when activists showed that the system could, under certain circumstances, endanger the secrecy of the vote. An official commission found that the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, which was responsible for organizing elections, was lacking in-house expertise, causing too much dependence on vendors and certification agencies. Voters had to switch back to pen and paper.

I am told that there are also some 20 to 30 states in the US that had the same experience of automating elections then reverting to the manual system.

Hybrid system — the better alternative

So now, we come to a third alternative — the combination of the manual and the automated systems, ergo, the hybrid system. Precinct-counting is manual, transmission of the results is electronic and the three-level canvassing is automated. To facilitate the multi-copy printing of the election returns and their electronic transmission to the canvassing points, a laptop can be used, in parallel with the manual counting, or, to encode the counting results at the end. Precinct-counting will only take 5 to 12 hours longer, approximately — compared to using VCMs; not much really, especially considering that this is out of a throughput time of about a week.

Precinct-counting duration can, however, be shortened by implementing system improvements: for example, coding of candidate names, as is done in some Asian countries, reducing the number of voters per precinct by un-clustering them back to the original 250 maximum (from the current 600-1,000), which will expectedly result in an increase in the number of precincts (they were clustered before only because it would have been too expensive to equip about 300,000 precincts with VCMs),

By the simple shift to the hybrid system (i.e., no VCM), the following list of good points can be gained:

– Some safeguards in the current system can be eliminated: no need for the monthslong VCM source code review (review only the canvassing software); no need for the final testing and sealing of the VCM at each and every precinct; and no need to generate the VCM hash code in every precinct for comparison with the established VCM hash code.

– All steps of the election process are transparent to the voting public; precinct-tallying is done under the watchful eyes of the voters.

– Accuracy of the counting is very high; after all, manual counts are the basis of accuracy.

– Very minimal electoral board (formerly, BEI) training and no voter training necessary.

– Vulnerability to cheating is very low; only retail cheating, if at all.

– Software will use Open Source, which can be reviewed by anybody interested.

– Since only laptops and servers will be used, they can even be purchased in any big city; therefore less logistics concerns; business opportunities are spread wider.

– No warehousing and equipment maintenance necessary (hundreds of millions of pesos worth) as all the machines can be sold to private schools and/or donated to public schools after each election; a new set can be purchased every three years.

– Cost is at most half of that of the VCMs presently employed by Comelec.

– No need for the random manual audit, since all votes will be counted manually, anyway.

– Will put an end to the perennial question asked about our automated elections — can we trust the results? — since precinct-counting is witnessed by the voters.

Bad point: The teachers (electoral board) will have to stay a few hours longer because of the manual counting. This inconvenience can, however, be made acceptable by increasing their allowances correspondingly. Better for the budget to go to the teachers than to the foreign VCM supplier. (The savings in not buying/renting the VCMs and purchasing laptops instead should be more than enough to cover this increase in allowance.)

The hybrid system will not require a new law; just a Comelec resolution to adopt it. There should, however, be continuing efforts to have a law enacted, which at the present time, since there are already proposed bills on this in both houses of Congress, would simply mean lobbying for their passage.

A law would compel the Comelec to put an end to the use of the non-transparent Smartmatic system for the country's elections and ensure that it is replaced by the better, much more transparent one — the hybrid election system.

Enactment of the law should be fairly easy as there appears to be no opposition to it. Even President Marcos, Jr. and his sister, Sen. Maria Imelda Josefa "Imee" Marcos, had expressed their support for it as early as 2016.

We still have almost three years before the 2025 elections — certainly more than enough time to prepare for it. But let's start now, so there's time to streamline the whole process. And the Comelec can't say, "No more time!"