Gubernatorial candidates address healthcare access concerns for undecided voters in poll

WASHINGTON – A recent poll by the Seattle Times, King 5, and the University of Washington found that 16% of voters remain undecided in the gubernatorial race between Attorney General Bob Ferguson and former Congressman Dave Reichert.

We asked undecided voters to send us questions they had for both candidates all week.

4 News Now has covered some of the questions we received in previous stories, but there was one question we hadn’t yet addressed.

How will you increase access to affordable health care?

Reichert’s response, “We need to create more private public partnerships within the healthcare system. And then, thirdly, I think that the technology we have today allows us to have a more robust tele-med system, and I think we need to invest some money in the tele-med system.”

Ferguson’s response, “We need to make sure that we’re preserving access to health care all across our state. Something I heard in going to all 39 counties as part of this campaign was individuals, especially in more rural communities, not having access to health care. And that as a state, is something we need to make sure we’re looking at and we’re investing in and preserving”

How do you feel about election integrity?

Not only is this a nation-wide concern, but Washington is often attacked since we are a vote-by-mail state.

Reichert said he feels that we have one of the best systems in the world when it comes to election integrity, though he says more can always be done to ensure accuracy.

“I think there needs to be an audit on the system after each election to see whether or not there have been mistakes, if there are legitimate if there are glitches in in in the in the system,” said Reichert.

Reichert said there can also be better efforts to make sure we aren’t sending ballots to deceased people. According to the Associated Press, this is a rare occurrence, according to the Associated press.

It’s also important to note that in Washington each county does conduct a post-election audit after every election.

As for Ferguson, he feels confident in our election system.

“Study after study shows Washington State’s election system is strong. So, you know, those are the experts who review it,” said Ferguson. “We do hand recounts. We’ve shown we just had that in our lands Commissioner race, in the primary, there is a hand recount that came out, I think, almost literally, you know, to the vote, to what the count had been.”

The hand recount during the primaries in the race for commissioner of public lands differed by ten votes when looking at the original machine count. That was out of over 790,000 votes total.

You can find out more about Bob Ferguson’s plans here, and for Dave Reichert’s plans click here.

Gubernatorial candidates address healthcare access concerns for undecided voters in poll

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