Scaling behavior in a proportional voting process

We perform a statistical analysis on the proportional elections held in Brazil in October 1998. We show that the distribution of votes among candidates for the whole country follows a power law $N\left(v\right)\mathrm{}\propto v^{-\alpha }$, with $\alpha =1.00\mathrm{}\pm 0.02$, extending over two orders of magnitude. The voting distributions for several states of the federation also display scale-invariant behavior with $\alpha \approx 1$. We argue that this particular voting system can be modeled as a typical multiplicative process in which the choice of the candidate is governed by a product of probabilities.