WASHINGTON -- Five years ago, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades became famous for inventing the popular "Flying Toasters" screen savers.

Today, the wealthy Berkeley, Calif., couple are becoming well-known for creating MoveOn.org, a pioneering effort to use the Internet as a grassroots political organizing tool. MoveOn's decision to hold the first-ever online Democratic primary last week was the latest milestone for the politically progressive group.

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean finished first, but a strong showing by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, prevented Dean from winning enough votes to secure the online advocacy group's outright endorsement.

Together, Dean and Kucinich captured nearly 70 percent of the votes in a process that one practitioner of online politics called "the liberal primary." In two days of e-mail balloting -- Tuesday and Wednesday -- 317,647 votes were cast, more than are cast in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary combined.

Dean captured 44 percent of the votes -- about 20,000 short of the number he needed to win the Moveon.org endorsement outright. Kucinich was second with 24 percent. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., finished third with 16 percent. No other candidate broke out of the low single digits.

Dean was an early favorite of progressive Democrats due to his support for same-sex civil unions in Vermont and his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq. That plus his early and energetic start in Iowa have moved a little-known dark horse into the front ranks of the nomination battle.

MoveOn organizers said they were surprised that retired Gen. Wesley Clark picked up about 1 percent support as a write-in candidate. Clark, a military analyst for CNN during the war with Iraq, has not ruled out joining the race.

Since its beginning in 1998 as a two-person effort to protest the impeachment of then-President Bill Clinton, MoveOn has grown to 1.4 million members in the United States, with another 700,000 members outside the country.

Through its easy-to-use Web site, MoveOn encourages its members to sign online petitions, phone lawmakers, write letters to newspaper editors and donate money to specific causes and candidates. Members also are encouraged to suggest the issues on which the organization should focus. Issues spotlighted by MoveOn over the years have ranged from campaign finance reform to gun control to efforts to stop media consolidation.

In addition, the MoveOn political action committee has raised more than $6.5 million for political candidates over the past two elections, and in the 2000 election, it helped to defeat Rep. James Rogan, the California Republican who led the successful House impeachment effort against Clinton. The effort died when the Senate did not muster the votes to remove him.

Although membership in MoveOn had grown steadily over the past few years, it skyrocketed during the recent Iraq war, enabling the group to raise $1.3 million for an antiwar advertising campaign built around the theme "Inspections work/War won't."

In addition, nearly 55,000 voters pledged to volunteer for their preferred candidate and more than 49,000 pledged to contribute money to their candidates

Before the war, the organization collected more than 1 million signatures on an anti-war petition and coordinated a one-day "Virtual March on Washington" that jammed congressional phone lines.

"MoveOn is probably the first successful example of a nationwide grassroots organization that occurred spontaneously," said Harvard University political scientist Elaine Kamarck, who studies the role of the Internet in political campaigns.

Michael Cornfield, research director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, said MoveOn has been successful because "they empower their members to take action.

"Also, they have a knack for riding emotional waves stirred up by the news," Cornfield said. "I'm surprised they haven't been imitated as yet. I think they may become to the politics of this decade what the Christian Coalition was in the 1980s: the key multi-issue pressure group."

MoveOn was born Sept. 22, 1998, when Boyd and Blades bought a Web site for $89.95. The couple was fed up with what they saw as the GOP-led obsession with impeaching Clinton for lying about his sexual escapades with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

The couple named their Web site MoveOn.org and put up a petition urging Congress to censure Clinton and move on to other issues. A week later, 100,000 people had signed the petition. By December, more than a half-million people had joined the campaign, sparking a wave of e-mail messages and phone calls to members of Congress.

Intrigued by the Internet's ability to empower ordinary citizens, Boyd and Blades decided to keep the name MoveOn and branch out to other political issues. They also decided to create a separate MoveOn political action committee to raise money for like-minded candidates and causes.

"A lot of people expected them to flame out after the impeachment," said Jonah Seiger, a visiting fellow at the George Washington University Institute. "But they kept going. They also recognized that money is power. They really put themselves on the map in terms of their ability to raise money.

"It's one thing to be able to mobilize several hundred thousand people. It's another thing to raise $3 million over the Internet and take out an incumbent member of Congress [Rogan]. That was the moment that forced a lot of establishment Washington to take these guys seriously.

"Now," Sieger said, "MoveOn is seen as an unpredictable but very powerful force in politics."

Although there are any number of political groups that use the Internet for organizing and fund-raising, Seiger believes that MoveOn is unique because it exists only online. "It's not a group that has been around for years and is now using the Internet," he said. "MoveOn is an ad hoc organization that was born out of the Internet and exists solely on the Internet."

Despite its increasing status in American politics, MoveOn still operates on a shoestring. It has an annual operating budget of $300,000 and only four paid staff members, who live in different parts of the country. The group chooses its issues carefully and tries to distill information about those issues to its members in a simple, common-sense way.

"They do their homework before they send out e-mails to their members," said Georgia Institute of Technology public policy professor Hans Klein, who studies on-line democracy. "They are careful to really leverage the time of their members."

Eli Pariser, the 22-year-old MoveOn staffer who directed the group's anti-war campaign, said the organization chooses issues "that make sense to people outside the [Washington, D.C.] Beltway. We try to work on issues that are important to people, that we can make a difference on, and that people are already thinking about a bit."

That's how MoveOn decided to hold the first online primary, Pariser said.

"This primary is doing exactly what we want to be doing," he said. "We are engaging members in the presidential process, we are making campaigns pay attention to grass-roots volunteers, and we are connecting people with the campaigns.

Harvard University's Kamarck believes that MoveOn is now a permanent part of American politics. "I believe they will be a force simply because of their numbers and the straightforward approach they have to using the Web for politics," she said.