A rarity: good news from Albany.

On Monday, the New York State Senate passed the National Popular Vote bill, fifty-two to seven. Not only was the vote one-sided, it was also gratifyingly bipartisan. The Democrats' yeas and nays were thirty to two, the Republicans' twenty-two to five.

New York is a spectator state. Apart from getting dunned for dollars, New Yorkers just aren't in the game. It's a foregone conclusion that the Democratic candidate for President is going to get a hundred per cent of New York's electoral votes. But if the election were determined by the total popular vote in the whole country—which is what the N.P.V. plan would guarantee—then New York's voters would be as worth cultivating as Ohio's or Pennsylvania's.

More to the immediate point, so would New York's politicians, Democratic and Republican alike. If the distinguished members of our state's upper chamber are not quite the heirs of Solon and Cicero, they do have a certain animal cunning. They know where their interests lie. In this case, happily, their interests coincide not only with those of all their constituents, regardless of party, but also with an elementary tenet of democracy: that elections should be decided by counting up the votes of citizens, with every individual vote being of equal value.

The bill now goes to the Assembly, which has a hundred and fifty members, eighty of whom have signed on as sponsors. Unfortunately, the Speaker, Sheldon Silver, is not one of those eighty, so the bill's place on the legislative calendar is not guaranteed. If you're a New Yorker and want to help, the National Popular Vote Web site makes it easy.

Read more: www.newyorker.com