So what are New Yorkers to make of the fact that the New York State Senate has just passed a measure that, had it been in effect in 2004, would have required the state’s delegates to the electoral college to cast their votes for George W. Bush — even though New Yorkers voted overwhelmingly for Senator Kerry? What were the senators thinking by suggesting that we should have in place a system that would have, had it been in force, required the state to give its electoral votes to a candidate New Yorkers didn’t want to be president?

It turns out the Senate was endorsing a measure known as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is trying to get states to enter an agreement in which each member state would assign all its delegates to the Electoral College to the winner of the popular vote. The Assembly in Albany has yet to approve the measure, but it passed the Senate by a wide margin. Had such a compact been in effect in 2004, New Yorkers, who voted that year overwhelmingly for Senator Kerry, would have seen their delegation to the Electoral College cast their votes for Mr. Bush.

The compact on which New York is deciding has only been approved by five states, far too few to bring the agreement into effect. But the advance of the measure here prompted us to put in a call to Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker. He has been nursing this cause with his capacious pen for some years. Is what passed the Senate in Albany, we asked him, the plan you want? He confessed it is. As, at our urging, he rattled on, we began to see that there is a lot more to his argument than might be imagined by us partisans of the original compact. Not that we were surprised. Mr. Hertzberg is nothing if not ahead of this story.

The first thing he said is that, had the plan been in effect in 2004, it’s not completely clear who would have won the popular vote. This is because were a system in place under which each state delegation had to vote for the popular vote winner, the whole game would be changed. Under the current system, candidates don’t run popular vote strategies in the first place. It’s a shrewd point, though at the rate things went in 2004, it’s hard to imagine how Mr. Bush could have become a winner in New York. Or, for that matter, how Mr. Kerry could have spent his money to win the popular vote elsewhere. His boat, so to speak, just wasn’t that swift.

In any event, Mr. Hertzberg and the other proponents of National Popular Vote are prepared to plunge ahead with a system that might force states to give their votes in the electoral college to candidates other than those voters in the state would have preferred. It wouldn’t have been as painful, Mr. Hertzberg suggested, as it was to watch the presidency go to a candidate, like the aforementioned Mr. Bush, who won in the Electoral College even though he lost the popular vote.

The decision New York is mulling wouldn’t bring the plan into effect. Under the National Popular Vote plan, the plan wouldn’t come into effect until it is approved by enough states to account for at least the 270 of the Electoral College votes needed to gain the presidency. New York would, if it completes its approval, be but the 6^th state to approve the plot. And then there’s the question of whether the plan would be approved by the United States Congress. If not, it wouldn’t be constitutional.

This is because Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution prohibits any state from entering into an agreement or compact with another state absent the consent of Congress. Similar language was contained in the Articles of Confederation. There’s a discussion of the constitutional question in a book called “Every Vote Equal,” in which the inventor of the plan, John Koza, and other authors lay it all out. If they don’t seem scared of the Constitution’s compact clause, it’s no doubt because if they can get all these states to enter the compact, they can probably get Congress to approve it.

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So what is the real aim? “The big advantage,” Mr. Hertzberg tells us, “is that it would make grassroots politics worth doing everywhere.” This is when, as we were sketching our notes for this editorial, we jotted down the headline “Palin’s Path To Power.” As a general matter, conservatives — though none that we know would assert the Constitution is perfect — are generally loath to tamper with fundamental law. National Popular Vote might not tamper with the power of the states, under the Constitution, to decide for themselves how their delegates to the College are instructed. But it certainly would tamper with the Founders’ view that the states themselves are constituents in the American contract. So we have our doubts about whether the scheme will, in the end, prosper. But wouldn’t it be something if it did come into effect in time for Sarah Palin, say, to show the liberals what the idea of a national popular vote might unleash.