Washington (CNN) Connecticut is joining a national drive to effectively elect the president by popular vote.

The state's legislature passed a bill, pledged to be signed into law by Gov. Dan Malloy, that would bring the state into an arrangement in which states would deliver their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of the state's results.

Once enough states join the agreement -- it takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency -- it could have the effect of controlling the Electoral College.

"The vote of every American citizen should count equally, yet under the current system, voters from sparsely populated states are awarded significantly more power than those from states like Connecticut," Malloy, a Democrat, said in a statement . "This is fundamentally unfair."

As currently outlined by the Constitution and generally practiced on a state-by-state basis, each state assigns its votes to the Electoral College to the candidate who wins the most votes in a given state.

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