Booz Allen Hamilton sees a HUGE difference btwn Dems and Repubs

[Jim Lane]

23. I'm glad someone noticed that these are EMPLOYEE donations.

Booz Allen is a corporation. It's therefore prohibited from making contributions to federal campaigns. You should not picture the Board of Directors of Booz Allen meeting to assess the candidates and then voting to send corporate funds to any of them. Unless there's a loophole I don't know about, the total amount of corporate funds contributed to each of the candidates listed in the OP was zero.

When an individual makes a campaign contribution, the donor is asked to list his or her employer. This information is solicited in all cases and is mandatory over a certain threshold (I forget if it's $100 or $200). The purpose of this disclosure requirement is that contributions from a particular company or a wider industry can be aggregated and tabulated, but the total represent the choices of many individual employees.

A corporation is also allowed to run a PAC. Its employees (and, I think, members of their immediate families) may make contributions to the PAC, which may then make contributions to federal campaigns. Allocation of the PAC's funds would generally be the decision of the corporate leadership, directly or indirectly. (I say "generally" but even that's not ironclad. I think some PAC's allow and even encourage pass-through giving: If you, as an employee, want to make a contribution to Frieda Firebrand, please make it as an earmarked contribution to the PAC, which will then contribute to her campaign, even though non-earmarked PAC funds are being used for contributions to her opponent, Senator Sleepy. Corporations like to be able to go to whichever candidate wins and remind the Senator how much his or her campaign received from the PAC.)

The bottom line is that the aggregated figures in the OP probably tell us more about the breakdown of individual employees' choices than about what the CEO, other top officers, or the Board thought.

Note that Citizens United did not change rules about corporate campaign contributions, but rather addressed "independent" expenditures using corporate funds. Obviously, many of those expenditures are independent in name only. The point, here, is that they're not included in the figures in the OP, which (as I read the OP) addresses only direct contributions to campaigns.