I only discovered the election because I happened to check meta, which I don't do every day here. (The sidebar? It's carefully designed to be discrete and boring, so whoever notices anything there?)
I only just realized that I should have received an inbox notification, but didn't. (I checked my inbox, nope, I didn't miss it, it's not there). Given the extremely low (17) number of visitors to the election page (for comparison, there were 46 on Network Engineering, which also held an election while still having the beta design), I guess I'm not the only one. And I haven't received a notification of the election phase, either.
Election notifications are not being sent. I can't think of a good reason not to do it, and I can't find anything about that on MSE, so I'm chalking it out as a bug.
I'm told that Chemistry and Biology users weren't notified either.
Sending notifications now wouldn't significantly affect voting on Crypto.SE, but it's too late for anyone to nominate. Should the nomination period be extended?