It’s implausible, and seems unlikely for now, but here’s one way it could happen:
“Trump makes unfounded claims that China interfered in the election, the Justice Department investigates, the legislatures of four swing states Biden appeared to win decide to refuse to certify the Electoral College slate pending the investigation, the Supreme Court rules that the Electoral College must be held without those states, and Trump wins when the election is thrown to the House of Representatives voting by state.”
But a “claim that state legislatures and the Supreme Court would disingenuously overturn a clear election result with a bogus interference theory, even if the President were to invite such action, is fanciful.” (For source, and discussion of other possible scenarios, including a foreign power stuffing ballot boxes, click here.)
A more realistic and likely scenario, in fact one all but certain to occur, is
“a strategy designed to suppress voter turnout with the purging of registration rolls of large numbers of mostly urban voters; efforts to suppress mail-in ballots, which are more necessary than ever, given COVID-19; a re-election apparatus that is training 50,000 poll watchers for the purpose of challenging citizens’ right to vote on Election Day; and significant efforts to make in-person voting in urban areas as cumbersome as possible in order to have long lines that discourage people from exercising their voting rights.”
But whether these efforts will prevent enough votes from being counted to thwart a Biden victory remains to be seen. (For source, and a more detailed outline of the first scenario above, click here. To activate .gif below, click on image.)
There is a problem with your scenario as legislatures do not certify the slate. The electors meet, and vote. The legislatures part is appointment and that is long done by the time the electoral college meets in each state. There could be issues with a Secretary of State in a state not having counted all the votes or issues with how the votes were counted and that would lead to court actions, and that could give the House of Representatives and US Senate reason to not count a states electoral collage votes. Most likely there would be something in the two Mahogany boxes for every state when the US Congress meets to certify and count the electoral college votes…which the Archivist of the United States has already done and communicated with the U Congress. And each states electoral electors send out 6 certificates of Vote sent to various Federal officials each states Secretary of State and nary a mention of any States legislature, whose legislatures cannot be members of the electoral college.
At this moment it is impossible to know who will win come election day. It is entirely possible that Biden has peeked, a scenario that has been repeated many times with an incumbent in office. The biggest example being the election of 1948 with Truman.
It’s not my scenario. Click on the links for proper attribution. In Washington, the legislature doesn’t appoint the electors. See Chapter 29A.56 RCW for the procedure. And while we don’t know who will win, if Trump loses, his leaving office shouldn’t even be under discussion. It should be a given, with no argument or debate. That these scenarios worry thinking people is problematical. You should join me in hoping they are merely alarmist and, if Biden wins, we’ll see there’s nothing to the strange vibes emanating from Trump and those who know him well.
Yes, to all that Poster 2 wrote. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, quote from his book “Disloyal” to be released September 8, 2020:
“Trump had cheated in the election, with Russian connivance, as you will discover in these pages, because doing anything – and I mean anything – to ‘win’ has always been his business model and way of life.”
He will do anything to win. Business model put to practice.
– Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump”