I voted by mail in the primary and requested my mail in ballot for the general election last month. I don’t know when to expect it.
People who intend to vote by mail should know by when they should receive their ballots. If they don’t, they need to call their county registrar of voters and alert their party immediately that it happened. Here’s why.
In 2018 I was a poll observer for the Democratic Party at a polling place in central California that had a close congressional race. People started to come in who said they had never received their ballots. It turned out that the county registrar had failed to mail out about half the mail in ballots for the county. I’m quite sure this was intentional, because when the poll supervisors rushed to get more provisional ballots from a warehouse an hour away, the registrar refused to give his permission for them to do so. All the polling places ran out of provisional ballots, and voters had to be turned away after that. And provisional ballots are rarely counted. Provisional ballots are hard on polling workers; they take a lot more time. People who were there to vote in person had to wait for hours, and many had time constraints that forced them to leave before they could vote.
This story has a reasonably happy ending. The Democratic candidate still defeated the Republican incumbent in a landslide. I never found out what happened to the registrar, but I doubt he still has his job. The Democrats had a civil suit pending, but dropped it after the results were announced. Lawsuits cost money.