IT expert and former Commission on Elections (Comelec) Commissioner Gus Lagman reiterated his calls for hybrid elections in the upcoming May local and national midterm elections on Friday.

In the weekly “The Agenda forum” at Club Filipino in Greenhills, San Juan City, Lagman urged the Comelec to make the counting of votes manually at the polling precincts to ensure transparency.

“Bring back manual counting in the precincts so that people can see what really happened in the precincts,” he told reporters.

He also noted that all political parties should have a copy of the election results.

“What’s happening is that we don’t see anything, that’s the worst part,” Lagman said.

Lagman also pressed the Supreme Court to look into the alleged rigging during the 2022 national elections as he emphasized that election results should come from the polling precincts going to the Comelec.

“Why did everything come from just one IP address? It’s clear that there was manipulation in the election results,” Lagman said.

“Maybe the public doesn’t know that [Comelec] chairman [George Erwin] Garcia was once an election lawyer for BBM [President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.],” the former Comelec commissioner added.

For his part, retired Brigadier General Eleseo Rio Jr., former Undersecretary for Operations of the Department of Information and Communications Technology during the Duterte administration, said they have already asked the SC to address this matter.

“We went to the Supreme Court to make everything transparent and nothing hidden. Why are they afraid to release it?” Rio asked.

“The transparency of how our votes are counted, that’s what we are after. Because right now, you put the ballot into the VCM [vote counting machines], but you don’t know how the machine counts it because they could insert a program there,” Rio added.