title: Scaling behavior in a proportional voting process.
abstract: 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(v) is proportional to v(-alpha), with alpha=1.00+/-0.02, extending over two orders of magnitude. The voting distributions for several states of the federation also display scale-invariant behavior with alpha approximately equal to 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.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Campus do Pici, Centro de Ciências Exatas, Caixa Postal 6030, 60455-760 Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil.
authors.forename: R N
authors.initials: RN
authors.lastname: Costa Filho
authors.forename: M P
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Almeida
authors.forename: J S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Andrade
authors.forename: J E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Moreira