Citizens United is a Supreme Court case that gives corporations the same rights as individuals in political elections in regards to supporting a particular candidate. In that, corporations are allowed to spend or donate an unlimited amount of money to a political campaign, just as there are no restrictions on individual donors.

However, this can cause problems when “dark money” is used in campaigns. Dark money refers to off-the-record donations where the donor is undisclosed. Common voters cannot see where the donations to the campaign are coming from, or from where. This aggravates the gap between the influence of common voters and the influence of wealthy donors and corporations even more than it needs to be thanks to the current campaigning system.

Additionally, with the use of “dark money,” citizens can’t be sure who is influencing the presidential nominees. Whether it is true or not is debatable (likely largely because of dark money donations,) but Donald Trump has gained a lot of support based on the idea that he is funding his own campaign and thus is “not for sale,” and does not need to bend to the special interests of major companies and wealthy donors. With the current system under Citizens United, we can’t be sure if a presidential candidate’s decisions are truly their own or based off of financial pressures.

Looking at the campaign contributors of current United States president Barack Obama, many common names are on the list. His top-ten contributors are, in order: University of California, Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., the United States Government, Harvard University, the United States Department of State, Kaiser Permanente, Stanford University, Colombia University, and Deloitte LLP. University of California alone donated over a million dollars. While these companies and organizations themselves did not donate, the Political Action Committees associated with the organizations made the decision to donate in the name of the companies. This also does not account for dark money donors, who would not need to be disclosed in the official total of donations for the Obama campaign.

Since the majority of the top donors to the Obama campaign where university PACs, many would say that there is no way that he could have been inclined toward legislation that would have benefitted them. However, the cost of higher education has become and major issue in this country during the time that Obama was in office. Perhaps he didn’t push more for legislation that would have made a university education more affordable because he was receiving money from various universities? With so few citizens well aware of the unlimited amount of money PACs associated with companies and organizations are allowed to donate under Citizens United, it can be hard to say.

Similarly, perhaps Obama spoke about net neutrality as a positive because he is associated with Internet companies such as Microsoft and Google. The use of search engines and continued freedom on the internet would be a positive for these companies, and thus would be a positive for Obama since he was receiving money from their associated PACs.

Since these companies did choose to disclose their donation to the Obama campaign, these are simple, if unfounded, conclusions to come to. Yet the fact that other companies likely donated — and thus potentially influenced policy — without being forced to disclose their identity, makes the situation more complicated. The educated voter cannot analyze the situation if the information is being legally withheld from them. Corporations are not people, and the people should regain their right to know what is happening with both candidates and corporations during presidential elections.