When people learn that the U.S. Government is the top contributor to Barack Obama's presidential campaign, their reaction is oftentimes one of surprise, even confusion. "How can the U.S. Government be a campaign contributor?" they ask.

It's a great question. The answer is that the U.S. Government, itself, can't be.

Employees of the U.S. Government, however, are a different story, and that's exactly who's given $2.1 million dollars to the campaign of Barack Obama (and over $500,000 to Mitt Romney).

To be clear, it's no mistake that the name of the U.S. Government claims the #1 spot when the contributions "it" has given are in fact from its employees. When calculating total contributions from a company or organization, it's standard practice for campaign finance analysts to include contributions from that entity's employees. Google, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and a whole host of other big companies decorate Obama and Romney's top donors lists — in each one of these cases, the majority of the contributions have come from the company's employees.

There are a couple of reasons why it makes sense to count contributions from a company or organization's employees in its total.

First, the main point of calculating total contributions is to shed light on money influencing our political system. Influence happens when large political contributions represent clear cut, special interests. Contribution checks don't have to be signed by a company's CFO in order to represent that company's interests. Individual employees, to the extent that they benefit from their employer's success (e.g., bonuses, raises, continued employment, etc), share its interests. So when hundreds of a company or organization's employees all decide to open their checkbooks for a candidate, resulting in millions of dollars contributed, that company or organization's interests are being represented by those dollars, and influence is being exerted.

Additionally, it's a common practice for high-ranking individuals within a company or organization to act as "bundlers" — people who work to gather many individual contributions for a particular campaign. In other words, when you see hundreds or thousands of individual contributions coming from a particular company, it's probably not the case that hundreds or thousands of people within that company woke up one morning and spontaneously felt called to contribute: there may well have been somebody within that company doing the calling.

Notwithstanding these good reasons for including employee contributions when calculating totals for a company or organization, it's important to note a potential danger of this methodology: it's easy, when we see six- or seven-figure numbers next to a company or organization name, to forget that most of that money is coming from individuals who have the company or organization's interests at heart, not the company or organization itself. But as Rootstrikers' first Capital in the Capitol infographic clearly highlights, two-thirds of all contributions are indeed coming from individuals.

This may seem like a nuanced point, but it's important to keep in mind as we fight for reform: until we find a way to curb the aggregate influence of wealthy, individual donors the problem of money in politics will remain unsolved.