Scaling behavior in a proportional voting process

We perform a statistical analysis on the proportional elections held in Bra zil in October 1998. We show that the distribution of votes among candidate s for the whole country follows a power law N(nu)proportional to nu(-alpha) with alpha = 1.00 +/- 0.02, extending over two orders of magnitude. The vo ting distributions for several states of the federation also display scale- invariant behavior with alpha approximate to 1. We argue that this particul ar voting system can be modeled as a typical multiplicative process in whic h the choice of the candidate is governed by a product of probabilities. [S 1063-651X(99)03907-0].