Bagumbayan presidential candidate Sen. Richard Gordon warned Tuesday that the sample ballots that the Commission on Elections (Comelec) will distribute to voters could be used for vote-buying on Election Day.

Gordon said the sample ballots could also be used to jam the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines to delay and sabotage the country's first automated elections on May 10.

“I’m calling on Comelec Chairman Jose Melo not to allow sample ballots. I’ve told them that before in my hearings at the Senate. That’s an unnecessary expense. They could use that to jam the machine to delay the elections. Besides, what is complicated about shading a circle?” he said.

“It’s environmentally-unfriendly, ostentatious and it’s an insane misuse of valuable resources that could go to the poor. And it will definitely be a tool for cheating, for vote-buying. Magbibigay kunwari ng sample ballot pero may butas yun, ipapatong dun sa papel, then the voter would shade,” he added.

Gordon said the sample ballots are unnecessary because people no longer have to write the names of the candidates they would vote for. Instead, they will only have to shade the circle beside the names of their chosen candidates.

Gordon, the author of the automated election law, said that although the automated elections may solve the problem of wholesale cheating in "dagdag-bawas" operations, the traditional ways of cheating, like vote-buying, could not be prevented through the mere use of computers in the elections.

Gordon said people who plan to cheat in the elections would resort to the old ways of cheating because "dagdag-bawas" would be very difficult to pull-off in an automated elections.