ABBA complain to OSCE about discrimination on vaccine pass to counting hall

The leader of the Christian-conservative party ABBA called on the electoral monitors of the Organisation for Security Cooperation in Europe, to deem the Maltese general election invalid, citing a litany of “unacceptable” electoral practices.

Ivan Grech Mintoff railed against a directive from the Electoral Commission not to allow unvaccinated people or those with a negative COVID PCR test inside the counting hall, saying this was discriminatory. The party has already lost a court petition on this matter alone.

He said both Labour and the Nationalist parties were organising daily mass events and knowingly breaking health regulations on COVID. “We are once again being discriminated against… because of their own illegalities and non-observance of the law, COVID cases are shooting up and the inevitable and useless regulations will be brought back after the elections. This will infringe our human rights and liberties.”

Grech Mintoff also complained that ABBA had been under-represented on national television.

Grech Mintoff also protested the gender quota mechanism, which he said was unconstitutional for guaranteeing an increase in parliamentary seats for the under-represented sex only for the two parties elected to the House.

He also complained that voters would not be asked to take off their mask in order for the assistant commissioners to properly identify the voters. “For the fist time, the voting booths are no longer fully visible to the electoral observers. The security procedures that are demanded by law have now been stripped away. With this final quirk the whole electoral system is now open to rampant fraud.”