For the next week or so, in homes all over California, ballots will be arriving for the June 2 primary.

Since 2020, a ballot has been mailed to every active registered voter in the state — more than 23 million, by last count. The time to choose is drawing nigh.

In addition to the race for governor, Californians will vote in contests for seven other statewide offices, the Board of Equalization — which oversees the property tax system — and a great many congressional, legislative and local races, including the primary for Los Angeles mayor.

What’s a voter to do?

If you’ve waited your entire life for a candidate like Republican Chad Bianco, the Riverside County sheriff running for governor, or you’ve been jonesing to cast a gubernatorial ballot for Democrat Katie Porter from the moment she whipped out her famous whiteboard, the choice is easy. Fill out that ballot and toss it in the mail, stat! No postage needed.

“Don’t mess around,” said Paul Maslin, a veteran Democratic campaign strategist. (His candidate for governor, Betty Yee, quit the race late last month, so he’s a neutral observer at this point.)

“If you have pretty good inkling what you want to do,” Maslin urged, “vote.”

But if, like many, you’re not wed to a particular candidate, what then? If you’re worried about mailing in your ballot and then having some awful, Eric Swalwell-like revelations surface, or if you fret about wasting your vote by supporting someone who drops out before June 2, then what?

There are no do-overs in a California election. Once you’ve cast your ballot, you’ve made your choice. That’s it, however sorry you may be.

Which is why Republican strategist Rob Stutzman, who’s worked in California politics for decades, urged voters not to mail their ballot too soon. Like Maslin, he’s unaffiliated with any of the gubernatorial campaigns.

“It’s a slow-developing race,” Stutzman said of the contest for governor, the marquee attraction on the June ballot. “These are still relatively little-known candidates. There’s going to be a lot more campaigning to go in the weeks ahead. [So] unless you feel really strongly about somebody, I’d hang on to that ballot and see what happens over the next several weeks.”

Then again, with all the talk of clamping down on mail-in ballots and concerns about processing delays by a stretched-thin Postal Service, is there a danger of waiting too long to vote? What if your ballot arrives past the deadline to be tallied?

In March, the U.S. Supreme Court strongly signaled a likelihood it would require mail ballots to be received by election day if they are to be counted as legal. As it stands, California accepts mail-in ballots that were cast before the end of election day, so long as they arrive no later than seven days after.

The court seems unlikely to issue its ruling before the June primary — but that’s not guaranteed.

So is there a sweet spot, somewhere between voting in haste and having your ballot go to waste?

The Official Voter Information Guide, produced by California’s secretary of state, urges those voting by mail to “return your ballot … as soon as you receive it.”

But Kim Alexander, head of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, falls into the wait-a-bit camp. “Don’t vote too early,” she counseled, “because this is a very dynamic election.”

Once you’ve made up your mind, her best advice is to mail your ballot at least a full week before election day, which is May 26, to ensure it arrives on time to be processed and counted. If someone wants to drop their ballot off in person, either at a vote center or secure drop box, Alexander suggests doing so by May 30, which is three days before the election.

“The good news,” she said, “is that under a new state law … all county election offices will be open at least six hours on Saturday, May 30, for voters to come vote in person or to turn in their vote-by-mail ballots.”

Voting in person is an option right up until 8 p.m. on election day, even if you received a ballot in the mail. That applies everywhere in California, save for three sparsely populated, rural counties — Alpine, Plumas and Sierra — which conduct their elections entirely by mail. Bring your unused vote-by-mail ballot to your local polling place and swap it for a polling-place ballot you can use instead.

For procrastinators or those wanting to wait until election day to mail their ballot, they run the risk that it won’t be postmarked until after June 2. That means it won’t be counted, regardless of when it arrives at their county elections office.

“Voters who want to hold out as long as possible … ought to be planning to turn their ballot into a drop box or a voting site and not use the mail at all,” Alexander said.

Having spent decades working to make voting easier and elections safer and smoother, Alexander knows that voting by mail has made many people miss “the election day experience.” (Things like bringing the kiddos into the voting booth, or posing for selfies with an “I Voted” sticker.)

Her suggestion is to find other ways to mark the occasion.

“Help somebody else go and vote,” Alexander suggested, “or volunteer to help with an organization” running a get-out-the-vote operation.

“If you want to help election officials get ahead on the vote count” — a source of repeated upset as the country awaits California’s lagging results — “you can be part of the solution by getting your own ballot in just a little bit earlier.”

All of which sound like fine ideas. That way you can celebrate election day and make sure your ballot isn’t cast for naught.

A California man is galloping to court after a Dutch horse dealer allegedly saddled him with a $500,000 lemon.

Gary Kamins sent his now 25-year-old daughter Gabby, who did competitive horse riding as a child, and her trainer Charmaine Levinson to Europe in August 2021, to pick out a horse for her to ride in competitions, he said in a lawsuit.

The pair settled on a $475,000 male horse named Grodino from Alan Waldman, whose Netherlands-based Waldman Horses allowed only a brief medical exam and provided no veterinary records, Kamins claimed in court papers.

But by the time the horse, whose barn name was “Dino,” was transported to the port of Los Angeles and on his way to Levinson’s Pacific Palisades stable, Kamins alleged it was clear something wasn’t right.

“Once Dino arrive at Cha Cha’s horse and training facility…[the horse] showed signs of physical pain and distress,” Kamins alleged in the California Federal Court papers.

Dino refused to do any jumps or training, and vets eventually realized he had a painful bone spur in its spine and a “progressive negative spinal condition.”

“Notwithstanding intensive veterinary care by Kamins for Dino, Dino never recovered and never competed in competition,” he claimed in the lawsuit, which alleged Waldman refused to refund the purchase price.

The doting dad was also out four years of funds he paid to Levinson to train and try to rehabilitate Dino, he said in the lawsuit, without detailing the amount.

He claims Waldman also paid Levinson an unknown commission.

Neither Waldman nor Levinson could immediately be reached for comment.

When the Bernie Sanders-aligned Our Revolution endorsed Tom Steyer in the unwieldy California governor’s race, the irony of a progressive group founded on an anti-billionaire ethos backing a multibillionaire wasn’t lost on its leader.

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“If you had asked me a year ago, ‘Oh, are you going to endorse a billionaire for anything? I think that would have been highly unlikely,” Joseph Geevarghese, Our Revolution’s executive director, said in an interview.

But Geevarghese said he’d been impressed with Steyer’s policy platform and engagement with liberal groups in the state.

“The most energizing and ideologically aligned candidate just happens to be a billionaire,” he said.

The unexpected alliance between progressives and Steyer — a hedge fund founder who’s faced criticism for past investments in controversial spaces like private prisons — has helped vault him into the top tier of a California governor’s race that lacks a clear favorite one month out from the all-party primary.

Despite initial skepticism from liberal groups and politicians in the biggest Democratic state in the country, Steyer managed to stay in the conversation with his consistent push for progressive priorities, like single-payer health care, taxing the profits of oil companies and a billionaire tax that is likely to appear on the ballot this fall.

Former Rep. Eric Swalwell’s exit from the crowded race last month and the struggles of other progressive candidates — including former Rep. Katie Porter, who’s backed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren — to gain traction helped further clear a lane for Steyer as he pumped more than $120 million of his own money into his campaign.

Irene Kao, the executive director of the progressive group Courage California, said their endorsement of Steyer in April “came as a surprise to us.” “But a lot of our work has to do with holding corporations and the wealthy accountable — so in some ways, we feel like it is a good thing that voters and people are approaching Tom Steyer in this race with that sort of skepticism and holding him to account, trying to get him to respond to his past investments and to talk about his story and development since then,” Kao said.

“But again,” she added, “it is really important for people to be really wary about the wealthy, how they generated their wealth and what they do with it.”

Steyer has noted that his hedge fund sold its holdings in the private prison space and that he exited the fund itself in 2012. He has apologized for the investment too, calling it a “mistake” and has run ads responding to the criticism.

Democratic state Rep. Alex Lee, the chair of the California Legislative Progressive Caucus, was one of the first state lawmakers to endorse Steyer in February. But even he recalled feeling “skeptical” about Steyer when he heard that he was running.

“I’m very sympathetic to voters who are skeptical of voting for a billionaire,” he said.

But as the field became clearer in recent months, Lee felt like Steyer had firmly taken over the progressive lane among Democrats in the race.

“Frankly, look at the other options,” Lee said.

Progressive support for Steyer didn’t come out of nowhere. Following his career at Farallon Capital, Steyer emerged as an outspoken climate advocate and founded NextGen America, a progressive PAC working on climate, health care and reproductive rights. His unsuccessful 2020 presidential run focused heavily on climate issues.

Steyer launched his gubernatorial campaign in November, and even before his latest endorsements, he’d already secured the backing of the state’s largest nursing union.

Still, even after deploying his massive war chest and picking up a stream of progressive endorsements, Steyer remains lumped together with a handful of other candidates in the polls in the race to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom. Candidates from all parties will appear on the same June 2 primary ballot, with the top two vote-getters advancing to the November general election.

Democrats have been desperate to unite behind one candidate to avoid a dreaded outcome of two Republicans emerging, but have struggled to do so. Ballots go out in the mail for early voting this weekend.

At the outset of the race, many Democrats assumed that the progressive lane was Porter’s to lose. A former student of Warren’s, Porter rose to prominence as a member of Congress for her sharp questioning of Trump administration officials during his first term and for her use of whiteboards to help unwind how big pharmaceutical companies hiked drug prices and to uncoil bank fraud scandals.

But her gubernatorial campaign got off to a rocky start after videos showing her yelling at a staffer and engaging in a tense interview with a local TV reporter both made waves nationally. (Porter apologized after each clip surfaced last year).

Progressive groups and lawmakers acknowledged that those videos contributed to their decisions to endorse Steyer.

“Some of that came up,” Geevarghese said. Kao said the videos “certainly were part of the equation.”

But California progressives also said they had questions about Porter’s consistency when it came to certain policies, and they ultimately felt that Steyer had simply advocated for their priorities more forcefully and more frequently.

Lee, who had endorsed Porter during her unsuccessful 2024 Senate run, said he chose Steyer this time around because he is “running a progressive policy-first campaign and that is what a lot of people wanted to see — and I just think people didn’t feel that or see that her in her gubernatorial run.”

Nonetheless, Porter has been endorsed by a number of prominent progressive elected officials, including Warren — who appeared in a campaign ad for her released Friday — Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., and the group End Citizens United. A tracking poll released April 20 by the California Democratic Party found that Porter was still earning the most support among self-identified progressive voters.

“Steyer made his billions off of investments in Big Oil, Wall Street, and private prisons — the very industries that Katie’s spent her entire career holding accountable. Katie has consistently fought for disenfranchised Californians, while Steyer’s fought only for himself,” Porter campaign spokesperson Peter Opitz said in a statement.

Meanwhile, progressives interviewed by NBC News also offered criticism of former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who’s seen his standing in the polls rise following Swalwell’s exit.

“I get very bristled by the fact that people are trying to pretend that he’s something he’s not. He has never on the campaign trail even claimed to be progressive,” Lee said.

Lee and others have criticized Becerra in particular for his role in handling the migrant crisis when he was in the Biden administration; for refusing to release certain police records related to officers who used deadly force when he was California’s attorney general; and for taking campaign contributions from Chevron.

A Becerra campaign spokesperson didn’t respond to questions from NBC News.

Recent polls show the gubernatorial field remains jumbled. A CBS News/YouGov survey released this week showed that 15% of registered voters backed Steyer. Becerra was at 13%, Porter was at 9% and no other Democrat had above 4%.

The poll also found that the two prominent Republicans in the race — former Fox News host Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — were still in the top tier. Hilton, who is endorsed by President Donald Trump, led all candidates, with 16%, while Bianco got 10%. All of these top-polling candidates fell within the survey’s margin of error.

A debate Tuesday night at Pomona College featured frequent sparring between Becerra and Hilton, as both candidates attempted to appear as their party’s frontrunners. They’ll all meet again for two debates on Tuesday and Wednesday.

As for Steyer, he repeatedly referred to himself during his closing statement as a “change agent” and made the case for why progressives should rally around him.

“We’re going to have to take on the corporate special interests that are driving up your costs and profiting off you,” Steyer said. “I am the person who is willing to do that. I am the change agent.”

“The people who support me are progressive — progressives, environmentalists and unions, including teachers and nurses,” he added. “If you want change, there’s only one person on this stage they’re scared of.”