The U.S. Postal Service’s internal watchdog is opening an investigation into concerns raised in a whistleblower report about the agency’s hasty effort to build a complex online system with voter data ahead of the midterm elections.

The online portal is intended to be an additional layer of screening for mail voting that President Donald Trump called for in a March executive order. A whistleblower said the system designed by the Postal Service had not gone through rigorous testing and could lead to substantial delays in voters’ receiving mail ballots.

Tara Linne, a spokesperson for the Postal Service’s inspector general, said the office had received the whistleblower report.

“We are currently analyzing the information and plan to conduct an independent review of these allegations,” Linne said in a statement Friday afternoon.

The executive order is facing several legal challenges, and its implementation has been indefinitely paused.

Most recently, the Postal Service said this voter data portal — an online system for states to upload information about voters receiving mail ballots — would be ready for use next week on a voluntary basis.

In a statement Friday, the postmaster general, David P. Steiner, acknowledged the whistleblower’s concerns about the pace of the project.

“Although development proceeded on an accelerated schedule, our standards for quality, security, and system integrity were not compromised,” Steiner said. “Testing and validation have been continuous throughout the development life cycle, and our process requires that deployment be delayed whenever significant defects or security vulnerabilities are identified, until those issues are appropriately resolved.”

Steiner said the additional screening of mail ballots was a necessary security measure to “facilitate enforcement of federal law and address concerns about election integrity.”

Trump has repeatedly promoted false claims of widespread mail-in voting fraud, even as he voted by mail in two elections this year.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Eileen Sullivan/Philip Cheung

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