  In proportional elections with open lists the excess of preferences received
by candidates with respect to the list average is known to follow a universal
lognormal distribution. We show that lognormality is broken provided
preferences are conditioned to lists with many candidates. In this limit
power-law tails emerge. We study the large-list limit in the framework of a
quenched approximation of the word-of-mouth model introduced by Fortunato and
Castellano (Phys.Rev.Lett.99(13):138701,2007), where the activism of the agents
is mitigated and the noise of the agent-agent interactions is averaged out.
Then we argue that our analysis applies mutatis mutandis to the original model
as well.
