US seeks to protect its electronic voting system against cyberattacks

Washington

THE Obama administration is weighing new steps to bolster the security of the United States' voting process against cyberthreats, including whether to designate the electronic ballot-casting system for November's elections as "critical infrastructure", Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said on Wednesday.

In the wake of hacks that infiltrated Democratic campaign computer systems, Mr Johnson said he was conducting high-level discussions about "election cybersecurity", a vastly complex effort given that there are 9,000 jurisdictions in the US that have a hand in carrying out the balloting, many of them with different ways of collecting, tallying and reporting votes.