The U.S. Postal Service said it would launch its mail ballot portal this week. Where is it?

In a recent declaration, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) told a federal judge that, during the week of Sept. 6, it expected to launch an online portal that’s crucial to enforcing and complying with its new mail voting restrictions.

“We anticipate being in a position to make the Portal available to users for voluntary use by sometime next week,” Steven Monteith, USPS’s chief customer and marketing officer, told U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in a Sept. 3 statement.

However, as of Friday evening — nearly a week after its statement to the judge — USPS’s portal is nowhere to be found, even as the Department of Justice (DOJ) continues to press the U.S. Supreme Court to force states to comply with the agency’s new mail ballot regulations.

Under its new rule, USPS intends to use the online tool, which it’s dubbed the “U.S. Federal Ballot Mail Portal,” to verify the design of envelopes states and counties use to send voters mail ballots. It would also collect state-specific lists of people eligible to vote by mail in upcoming elections through the portal.

Because of Talwani’s court order last week, USPS currently cannot refuse to deliver or reject election mail in states or counties that don’t comply with its new ballot envelope designs or don’t hand over their absentee voter lists.

But should the Supreme Court rule in the DOJ’s favor and stay Talwani’s court order, states and local governments that fail to comply will lose out on the only way they can send and receive mail ballots from voters.

Already, states and counties have mailed thousands of ballots to voters for the upcoming midterms. But because USPS’s portal remains missing, many of those ballot envelopes likely do not comply with the agency’s new mail ballot rule, which it adopted over a dozen days ago.

Earlier Friday, the country got a glimpse at how strict USPS’s new design requirements are after the postal agency initially rejected a Florida county’s ballot envelope because of a 0.014-inch spacing issue. The postal service only relented and accepted Leon County’s envelope after its elections supervisor, Mark Earley, filed an appeal.

If states are suddenly forced to comply with the rule, those noncompliant ballot envelopes — and thousands of other noncompliant envelopes already prepared, but not yet sent out by states and counties — could be at risk of being rejected or going undelivered, which would potentially disenfranchise voters. 

According to U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, however, the lower court’s order should still be stayed, even if voters are disenfranchised.

“If the injunction is eventually stayed and the rule takes effect for this year’s elections—as should occur—there is a grave risk that States may not have taken the necessary steps to comply, due to the false sense of latitude created by the court’s improper injunction, potentially depriving those States’ citizens of the ability to vote by mail,” Sauer argued in a filing to the Supreme Court earlier this week.

Notably, the solicitor general misstated which entity would be disenfranchising voters, as, in practice, it would be USPS refusing to deliver ballots to eligible voters.

Beyond not existing, USPS employees who would be central to checking state and county ballot envelope designs and verifying voter data on those envelopes have yet to receive training on the portal, the American Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO — which represents over 200,000 postal employees — told the Court this week.