Nate Silver Compiles Prop 8 Donations By Staffers At Major Silicon Valley Companies

Using a Los Angeles Times database of donations to the 2008 Proposition 8 campaign, stats guru Nate Silver has compiled a list of how the staffers of major Silicon Valley tech companies weighed in with their wallets.

The list includes Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Cisco Systems, Apple, Google, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Oracle, Yahoo, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Symantec. I limited the search to donors who listed California as their location. In total between these 11 companies, 83 percent of employee donations were in opposition to Proposition 8. So Eich was in a 17 percent minority relative to the top companies in Silicon Valley. However, there was quite a bit of variation from business to business. At Intel, 60 percent of employee donations were in support of Proposition 8. By contrast, at Apple, 94 percent of employee donations were made in opposition to Proposition 8. The opposition was even higher at Google, where 96 percent of employee donations were against it, including $100,000 from co-founder Sergey Brin. There isn’t much data on Mozilla. Only four Proposition 8 donors listed it as their employer: Eich, who donated in support of the measure, and three others who opposed it.

Silver notes that his result does not include those who chose to donate to either side of the campaign without disclosing the name of their employers. About 12% of those in the database did not.