The online buzz for this presidential campaign may be more than any in history. Recently there's been lots of Facebook listing the top donors to each campaign, but not all of those posts are completely accurate.
One popular post shows a spilt screen of President Obama and Mitt Romney. The post listed the candidates' top five campaign contributors. It lists most of Mitt Romney's money coming from banks and corporations and President Obama's donations from tech companies and universities.
For example, opensecrets.org sites Barack Obama's top donor as the University of California at over $700,000. We wondered how so much money could have been contributed considering all the budget cuts and tuition increases the UC system has faced, but here's what we found out. That number is just the total amount donated by anyone affiliated with a UC school.
The University of California told Central Coast News the school has never donated to any campaign. "Sometimes organizations such as opensecrets.org, take official data that is collected by the Federal Elections Commission and reports these data by demographic breakdown such as industry or company. So these numbers are in no way based on how the company feels about the candidates," said Dianne Klein. Other online blogs and political sites are also taking websites to task for misleading information during this election.
Here's the real truth: corporations are prohibited from making direct contributions to candidate committees. For example, employees at Bank of America and Chase gave money to Romney's campaign, not the banks themselves. "What this type of bundling does is frankly misleading because it implies that a company or institution contributes to a candidate or cause in question," said Klein.
It's also illegal for non-profit public institutions to endorse any candidates or causes. Opensecrets.org and other campaign fund-tracking sites do place a disclaimer on their site saying the organizations names on the list haven't given a dime.
