A national effort to institute the direct popular election of the American president is gaining momentum in the New York Legislature.

A small but growing number of state lawmakers who want to make New York a more potent force in presidential campaigns are pushing legislation that would enter the state into an interstate compact rendering the Electoral College obsolete.

With little fanfare, five Republican assemblymen in May proposed a bill that would direct New York’s electoral votes in presidential elections to the candidate who wins the plurality of the national vote. The compact would take effect only if the number of states entered into identical agreements represented a majority of the electoral votes. Once the threshold of 270 was met, which could be done with pledges from as few as 11 of the most populous states (or as many as 39 sparsely populated states), the candidate who won the most votes in the nation would be elected president.

The scheme, which is the brainchild of a computer scientist in California, has been seized by opponents of the Electoral College as a way to establish a popular vote system without a constitutional amendment, which requires the support of two-thirds of Congress and 38 states.

The plan takes advantage of what the Constitution says and does not say about the electoral system. The Constitution mandates an indirect system for electing presidents by which voters choose electors and electors choose candidates, but it’s silent on how the electoral votes are to be awarded. The Supreme Court has ruled that the power to choose a system for allocating electoral votes rests with states, 48 of which direct their votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state.

New York is one of six states whose legislatures have introduced the 888-word bill. This year, the legislation has passed the Democrat-controlled California Assembly and the Democrat-led Colorado Senate.

In New York, the bill was shunted aside during the end-of-session dealmaking and referred to the Assembly Committee on Election Law. Supporters are planning to revive it next year, when the Legislature returns from break and there is a new governor in office, according to the bill’s primary sponsor, Fred Thiele, a Suffolk County assemblyman.

Many lawmakers appear to be unaware of the legislation. Aides to the Republican majority leader of the Senate, Joseph Bruno, and the Democratic speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, said they did not know where the leaders stood on the legislation. A campaign spokeswoman for Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat who is the front-runner in the governor’s race, said the attorney general has not taken a position on the popular vote debate.

In an interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Thiele said he has “always been a proponent of abolishing the Electoral College.” He said he introduced the bill after he was approached by FairVote, a national election reform group that has been lobbying in favor of the bill across the country.

Mr. Thiele said presidential candidates ignore New York during campaign season because it’s not one of the battleground states. Voters in New York have voted Democratic in presidential elections for decades. “New York has been taken for granted,” Mr. Thiele said. “This would be a way … for New York again to be at more of the center of presidential politics.”

The architect of the legislation is John Koza, a consulting professor at Stanford University who specializes in genetic programming and who in the 1970s helped invent the rub-off lottery ticket used by state lotteries.

His interest in the presidential election system goes back to 1966, when he invented a not-very-successful board game called “Consensus” based on the Electoral College. He became disillusioned with the Electoral College after the 2000 race, which saw George Bush defeat Al Gore despite losing the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes.

“The biggest problem with the system was the issue distortion,” he said. States that are up for grabs dominate attention and money from candidates, while those that are not in play suffer as a result, he said.

Candidates talk more about ethanol, for instance — which is a big issue for Iowa corn farmers — than they do about illegal immigration, a primary concern of border states like Texas and Arizona, which are not battleground states. Mr. Koza said presidential candidates spend two-thirds of their campaign dollars on six states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Florida.

While the bill has received bipartisan support around the country, in New York it will likely face some opposition from Democrats who do not want to see New York’s electoral votes, which are now safely directed to Democrats, going to a Republican candidate.

The chairman of New York’s Democratic Party, Herman “Denny” Farrell, said he is personally opposed a popular vote system, saying, “I’m sick and tired of reforms that are not reforms.”