The ballot box scramble is escalating as Ontario’s election campaign hits its final four days, with Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne claiming “a vote for Andrea Horwath is a vote for Tim Hudak.”

It’s a message aimed at people planning to vote for Horwath’s NDP in an election that polls suggest is a tight race between Wynne and Hudak, her Progressive Conservative rival.

But the opposition leaders quickly shot back that Wynne’s gambit to hold on to the premier’s chair smacks of desperation in the wake of Liberal government scandals such as the $1.1-billion gas plants debacle now under police investigation.

“They are going to demand your vote because they’re addicted to power,” charged Hudak, who has promised to axe 100,000 public sector jobs and create one million in the private sector while cutting corporate taxes by 30 per cent.

“In the last few days of the campaign … you’ll see the Liberals trying to frighten you about our plan because they don’t want to talk about their record,” he said Sunday in a St. Catharines backyard.

In Toronto, Horwath also came out swinging, predicting a backlash against Wynne and telling voters they don’t have to choose between “corrupt and crazy” — a stab at her Liberal and Tory opponents — at the ballot box on Thursday.

“No matter how much she tries to scare people, people know they don’t have to listen, they don’t have to be told how to vote,” said the NDP leader, who trails in third place in public opinion surveys.

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Horwath slammed Hudak’s “Million Jobs Plan,” which was questioned by a number of prominent economists over inflated numbers, and the Liberals for scrapping power plants in Oakville and Mississauga before the 2011 election to save the skin of their local MPPs.

“You don’t have to choose between bad ethics and bad math,” added Horwath, who has promised to raise corporate taxes to help pay for promises such as cutting small-business taxes, bringing in a caregiver tax credit and slashing the HST on electricity bills while axing $600 million through a new ministry of savings.

Comparing the NDP platform to “incoherent” Rob Ford-style populism and saying says she’s “scared” of Hudak’s cuts that would damage government services such as health care and education, Wynne reached out Sunday at rallies in Mississauga and Kitchener to Ontarians who consider themselves progressives.

She denied that her pitch for voters leaning toward the NDP — which echoed an op-ed article she wrote in the Sunday Star — is a sign of panic.

“I just want people to be clear … we need their support. It is that close an election,” she told reporters after a rally with pounding pop music at a banquet hall near Pearson airport.

“You can’t stop Tim Hudak by voting for Andrea Horwath … If you want a progressive government, you have to vote for progressive government,” added Wynne, whose left-leaning spring budget was rejected by both opposition parties.

Hudak has said Ontario can no longer afford a big-spending government and has promised to cut 25,000 public sector jobs annually for four years through attrition and otherwise, reducing the sector to 2009 levels as the province fights a $12.5-billion deficit.

He is promising to balance the budget by the spring of 2017, a year earlier than Wynne and Horwath have pledged.

Wynne accused Horwath of refusing to rule out supporting the Conservatives in a minority situation, although Horwath has said she would not back Hudak’s plan for 100,000 job cuts.

In one of her fiercest attacks yet, Wynne called Horwath’s platform “an incoherent kind of list of disconnected ideas that tap into a kind of populist oversimplification of what public policy is.”

Horwath took exception to that, saying Wynne has forgotten that many Ontarians are finding life unaffordable and rejecting the charge that she tore a page from Ford’s agenda.

“If everyday folks can’t make ends meet, then it’s the obligation of a government to pay attention to that,” Horwath said.

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Wynne accused her rivals of “junk politics” for trying to reignite controversy over the gas plants scandal in recent days, as they press for the public release of information demanded by Ontario Provincial Police in their criminal investigation of deleted emails.

In addition to that probe, the OPP is investigating questionable business practices at the province’s ORNGE air ambulance agency.

In St. Catharines, Hudak shrugged off the Star’s editorial page endorsement of Wynne for premier, when he was backed by the Toronto Sun, the Globe and Mail and the National Post.

“I think three of the four papers are right,” he quipped.

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