Leader Election
A coordination procedure that selects one participant to perform leader-specific responsibilities for a defined term or epoch.
Distributed-Systems Context
Leader election selects one participant to perform leader-specific duties for a term or epoch. Heartbeats, monotonically increasing terms, and majority voting are commonly used so a returning old leader cannot safely continue acting with stale authority.
Failure-Model Boundary
A participant simply declaring itself leader during a network partition can create split brain. Quorum rules, leases, or fencing are needed when multiple candidates might otherwise act concurrently.