State legislatures can decide the method by which electors are appointed.
Congress gets to chose under the Constitution the date of voting by the electors.
Congress counts the votes and certifies a winner. Unless their is a contingent election.
That’s it. There is no requirement for there to be any direct election at all. The fact there is and steps 2-4 are usually formalities is a convention, not constitutional mandate.
As @AK84 says just above, the actual Constitutional limitations are pretty sparse. Speaking strictly to electing the POTUS, …
Those states with an R majority in their sitting statehouses could simply all pass similar laws saying that for 2020 the legislature, not the public, will decide how that state’s electors are to be selected and how they are to vote. Presumably those fine upstanding citizen electors would be told to vote R, that is, for Trump.
I’m not going to count the number of such statehouses, nor their total electoral college votes. That’s an exercise for the reader. My WAG is it’s well north of the number required to deliver the election to Trump.
In fact the recent SCOTUS finding on “faithless electors” gives credence to the general proposition that the Feds have been, and will continue to, leave it to each state to sort out how they manage all aspects of their presidential electors.
This has far less than a snowball in Hell’s chance of happening. If for no other reason than all the other Federal, State, and local offices and issues to be decided on a typical November ballot.
But it a way for the POTUS election to be different than normal while being completely legal, at least at the Federal level.
The problem with this plan is that states with a Republican governor and a Republican majority in the legislature tend to be Republican states - in other words, states that are going to vote for Trump already. You’re not going to convince the state governments in California or Illinois or New York to hand over their votes to Trump.
There are states where this could be a factor. Arizona, Florida, and Texas have Republican state governments but poll numbers show the majority of voters support Biden. But switching these states over to Trump wouldn’t be enough to give him a majority.
Delaying the election is probably just the usual Trump BS. Agitation for the sake of agitation. However, I do believe he will contest the election. He and Barr can make a lot of noise for maximum press. And, it gives Trump the scenario he wants to spend his remaining days whining about.
It’s great political theater and all we can do is sit back and watch the show (oh yeah - and vote).
This is correct, but most states have constitutions that requires popular election of electors and it is generally not so easy to change those constitutions. In PA, where I grew up it required two consecutive state legislators to pass it and the people to vote on it and just couldn’t get done in less than 3-4 years.