”Trump cannot, however, unilaterally decide to cancel or postpone the November 3 general election by an executive order, under the parameters of a national emergency or disaster declaration, or even if he declared martial law.
“Experts including the Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias and Josh Douglas, a professor of voting and election law at the University of Kentucky Law School, explained on Twitter in March that only an act of Congress could alter the federal statute to change the date that states appoint their electors.
“After all, Americans don't directly elect the president. Instead, states send designated electors to gather and vote in the Electoral College, which convenes, per federal law, the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. The electors submit their votes to elect the next president and vice president to the president of the Senate, a role filled by the presiding vice president.
“As Douglas told Insider in a March interview, Congress passed the law standardizing the date of the nationwide presidential election to be the Tuesday after the first Monday in November back in 1845 and hadn't changed the date since.
“The process by which states appoint those electors is laid out both in Article II of the US Constitution, which requires states to appoint a number of electors equal to the number of their representatives in the US House and Senate ‘in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,’ and in Chapter 1 of Title 3 of the United States Code, which sets the timing of that appointment.
“To change the date of the election, Congress would have to vote to alter Section 1 of the code, which stipulates: ‘the electors of President and Vice President shall be appointed, in each State, on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November, in every fourth year succeeding every election of a President and Vice President.’
“Notably, the federal law as written mandates that states appoint a number of electors equal to the number of congressional representatives on that date by some mechanism that the legislature agrees on. It does not, however, require that states even hold elections at all to determine how their electors will be allocated.
“Indeed, Douglas told Insider that for much of America's early history, many states didn't hold presidential elections as we know them today. Instead, state legislatures both voted to appoint their electors and voted to instruct them how to cast their votes at the Electoral College as opposed to holding an election of the people. And while all US states now allocate their electoral votes by a popular election in the state, they apportion their electoral votes differently.
“Most states use a winner-take-all system, where the candidate who wins over 50% of the vote gets all of the state's electoral votes. Maine and Nebraska, however, allocate two of their electoral votes based on the statewide results and the rest proportionally based on the vote share in the state's congressional districts.
“And furthermore, trying to postpone or cancel the 2020 election wouldn't benefit Trump. Even in the far-fetched scenario in which the 2020 presidential electors didn't formally cast their votes in December, it wouldn't automatically extend Trump and Vice President Mike Pence's tenures.
“Federal law stipulates that if the electoral college doesn't vote on the set date, the president and vice president's terms will automatically expire at noon on January 20, 2021. Then, control of the presidency would go down the line of succession first to the Speaker of the House of Representatives (assuming that House elections occurred) and then to the president pro tempore of the US Senate. So far, it's unclear how long the coronavirus outbreak will last and to what extent it will disrupt voting in November's general election.
“But while Trump cannot unilaterally move or postpone the 2020 election by executive action, Biden correctly pointed out that he could make it more difficult for people to safely vote by home with his current refusal to bail out the cash-strapped US Postal Service.
“Multiple states are already undertaking efforts to expand absentee voting and vote by mail for elections happening in the next few months and in November. But the Postal Service, which is essential to states' abilities to expand those provisions, warns that due to a steep drop-off in mail volume caused by the coronavirus crisis, the agency expects a $13 billion loss this year and could have to cease operations altogether by September without immediate help from Congress.
“Trump, who has been vocally hostile to the idea of expanding vote by mail, is actively opposed to any measures to help the Post Office and refused to sign the CARES Act stimulus package if it included a bailout for the agency, the Washington Post reported on April 11. ‘We told them very clearly that the president was not going to sign the bill if [money for the Postal Service] was in it,’ an administration official told the Post. ‘I don't know if we used the v-bomb, but the president was not going to sign it, and we told them that.’
“In the end, the final version of the CARES Act included $10 billion in additional borrowing power for the Postal Service subject to approval by the US Treasury Department. On Thursday, the Washington Post further reported that Trump and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, want to use the promise of the loan to force the agency to implement long-sought-after changes. ‘Imagine threatening not to fund the post office,’ Biden said at the fundraiser. ‘Now what in God's name is that about? Other than trying to let the word out that he's going to do all he can to make it very hard for people to vote. That's the only way he thinks he can possibly win.’
“In the status quo, 38 states have some form of early voting, 35 allow voters to request an absentee ballot without a documented excuse, and five states (Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Utah, and Hawaii) now conduct all their elections almost entirely by mail.
“But some Republicans have openly protested expanding vote by mail options because they believe it would hurt them politically. Trump said in a March Fox & Friends appearance that the House's proposed stimulus bill had ‘levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again.’
“Since then, Trump has continued to spread misinformation about the safety and security of voting by mail on his Twitter account, falsely claiming that it ‘substantially increases the risk of crime and VOTER FRAUD,’ an assertion that none of the available evidence on vote by mail supports.
“The evidence for Trump's claims that increased voter turnout would automatically benefit Democrats is flimsy at best. Indeed, a new working paper from Stanford University found that counties in California, Utah, and Washington saw no clear partisan advantage for either political party when they switched to holding elections by mail.
“But election experts like Douglas warn that time is running out for states to act to ensure a fair election. ‘The election administrative difficulties are stark but doable if we act quickly and we act soon to start implementing those policies,’ Douglas told Insider in March. ‘Is it possible? Yes. Do we have to act now? Yes. And the longer we wait to start influencing the policies as well as thinking about how you actually physically implement the system, the harder it is.’" (Business Insider).
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