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ANALYSIS : Simon Shuster
This week...President Putin's opposition held a 3-day online vote...to elect 45 new leaders.
Though the website was hacked at first...the vote was extended by one day.
The opposition has had mixed success organizing in the recent past...but now they may have finally succeeded.
"The task of organizing this virtual democracy then fell to Leonid Volkov, a pudgy and jovial activist from Yekaterinburg who happened to be good with computers.
With the help of four volunteer programmers — “no wizards,” he told me, “but super enthusiastic” — Volkov then designed what Navalny had envisioned in December as a “reconstituted Facebook.”
It allowed Russians to register online and cast their votes for 45 out of a list of about 200 candidates, who only had to pay a fee of roughly $300 to get on the ballot.
The resulting body will be called the Coordinating Council of the Opposition, and given the fact that it garnered 90,000 votes from around the world, its election was perhaps the greatest experiment in online democracy ever."
