Distributed Elections Using Site-Push Majority Winner Monitoring

Abstract

The problem of distributed election majority-winner monitoring for checkpoint-based protocols has been of interest for some time now, and the approach that most of the major algorithms take on this is to employ a center-based pull from all voting sites in conjunction with a count tracker, to continually monitor the information about the incoming voter stream. This paper presents an alternative solution to this problem, using site-based voter information push to the center, with reduced communication complexity, using a unique sampling technique. This technique is utilized to come up with a winner or an approximate winner with very high probability for Approval-based and Scoring-based rules. The site-push algorithm introduced here has been validated with correctness results, and has also been analyzed for different scenarios to see the improvement in the number of messages initiated, in comparison to the center-based pull algorithm considered for a checkpoint-based protocol. The effect of this algorithm is to reduce the communication complexity by a factor of $(1+\frac{\log {k}}{\log {\frac{n}{k}}})$ in comparison to the center-pull algorithm (where $k$ is the number of voting sites, and $n$ the number of voters), which leads to a large reduction in communication complexity in democratic election scenarios. Also, to analyze other scenarios, simulation results are presented to show how the algorithm fares under randomized voter assignment, with variations in the value of total voters, total sites and the approximation parameter $\epsilon$ .