Corporate personhood goes back to the beginnings of the English common law and was not the product of a mere "legal accident" by the U.S. Supreme Court.<p>Blackstone's Commentaries (11th edition, 1791), volume 1, p. 467 (ch. 18, "Of Corporations"):<p>"We have hitherto considered persons in their natural capacities, and have treated of their rights and duties. But, as all personal rights die with the person; and, as the necessary forms of investing a series of individuals, one after another, with the same identical rights, would be very inconvenient, if not impracticable; it has been found necessary, when it is for the advantage of the public to have any particular rights kept on foot and continued, to constitute <i>artificial persons</i>, who may maintain a perpetual succession, and enjoy a kind of legal immortality.<p>These <i>artificial persons</i> are called bodies politic, bodies corporate, . . . or corporations: of which there is a great variety subsisting, for the advancement of religion, of learning, and of commerce; in order to preserve entire and for ever those rights and immunities, which, if they were granted only to those individuals of which the body corporate is composed, would upon their death be utterly lost and extinct." (my emphasis)<p>I cite Blackstone, no small figure in either legal history or the law undergirding the U.S. constitution, to emphasize that he regarded it as <i>central</i> to the idea of what constitutes a corporation that it was to be treated as a legal "person." This is found in my <i>1791 edition</i> of this work.<p>Thus, this doctrine is hardly new or radical and certainly no one felt the need to mock it over the 200+ years during which it has been in effect by suggesting that a corporation exercise rights of a citizen by running for office.<p>All that said, I understand your point about its being claimed that this doctrine was accidentally incorporated into the Court's constitutional analysis but the core doctrine runs much, much deeper than the particular case cited in your linked article and (as reflected in the Blackstone quote) is and always has been fundamental to understanding the legal idea of a corporation.