Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker got up last week at a bar in Chelsea to welcome guests at a fundraiser of a group that supports electing presidents by popular vote. The host, Krist Novoselic (veteran of Nirvana), had been inducted the day before into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So Mr. Hertzberg was caught off guard when he discovered the microphone wasn’t working. He plunged ahead. “We’ll just have to shout,” he exclaimed.

They might not have to shout as loud as before this week. When few were paying attention, Governor Cuomo on Tuesday signed a law that made New York the tenth state to ratify what is called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. This is sometimes called an “end run around the Constitution,” but that isn’t quite accurate. Interstate compacts are perfectly constitutional if approved by Congress. It’s right there in the parchment, and don’t think these guys lack for awareness.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is also sometimes called an end run around the electoral college, though that’s not quite right either. NPV doesn’t skirt the college. It binds the states to instruct their delegates to the electoral college to vote for whichever candidate wins either a majority or plurality of the nationwide popular vote. States that have ratified the compact aren’t bound by it until enough states have signed to account for 270 electoral votes, enough to name the president.

Then, well, then . . . well, then, let us just say that then . . . what? Well, then, in the view of Mr. Hertzberg, hmmm. We’re not belittling him here; he’s one of the greatest political essayists of his time. But the full portent is not yet clear. He is putting it out that we would promptly start electing presidents by a more democratic, less republican (lower case d, lowercase r) system than we currently do. More like the way we elect our sheriffs, governors, and congresspersons.

One might trans-suppose that this would net out to the advantage of the Democrats. After all, the ten of the states that have ratified the NPV Interstate Compact tend to be Democratic. They are Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington, Massachusetts, Vermont, California, Rhode Island, and New York. Plus, the compact has been ratified by the Columbia District, which — through constitutional sleight of hand known but to God and Mr. Hertzberg— has fetched up with three electoral votes.

But oh is this issue slippery. Had the Compact Mr. Cuomo just inked been in effect in 2004, delegates from New York would have been bound to cast their votes in the electoral college for the arch Republican George W. Bush, even though voters in the Empire state went for Senator Kerry by a margin of 16 percentage points. Of course, if the Compact were in effect, New York might have voted differently, because both parties would have spent campaign money here.

This dynamic was well marked by Governor Cuomo, when he signed the measure on Tuesday. He cast a bit of a pall on the moment by boasting that it reflects “the Empire State’s tradition as a national progressive leader.” Bummer. But he also asserted: “By aligning the Electoral College with the voice of the nation’s voters, we are ensuring the equality of votes and encouraging candidates to appeal to voters in all states, instead of disproportionately focusing on early contests and swing states.”

What has advocates of the Compact so delighted about New York is the way it finally passed. It had been approved by the state Assembly some time ago. The hangup had been the Senate. When the vote came this year, though, it passed the upper body in Albany by an astonishing 57 to four. It was endorsed by both the quasi-Marxist Working Families Party and also by the pro-life Conservative party. And the Conservative Party scored the measure, meaning they would count it for endorsements.

So now it’s ten states. That mightn’t seem like many (there are fifty in all), but feature the fact that the ten that have ratified account for 165, or 61.1%, of the 270 electoral votes needed to elect a president. There are currently active bills in respect of approving the Compact in seven more states. They are Arizona, Connecticut, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania. They account for 76 more electoral votes, which would bring the total to 237 electoral votes.

We’d like to say that The New York Sun was placed on this earth to stand up for the constitutional fundamentals. But Mr. Hertzberg would insist that this is entirely within constitutional fundamentals. So we’ll just say that we like the republican (with a small r) nature of the system that elected Washington, John Adams, Jackson (the only president to win a war against the central bank), Lincoln, McKinley, Coolidge, and Reagan. Mr. Hertzberg, however, believes we could have the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact as early as 2020, maybe even 2016. We suspect that if we asked him he’d insist it’s all over but the shouting.