In the voter model, each node of a graph has an opinion, and in every round each node chooses independently a random neighbour and adopts its opinion. We are interested in the consensus time, which is the first point in time where all nodes have the same opinion. We consider dynamic graphs in which the edges are rewired in every round (by an adversary) giving rise to the graph sequence @math , where we assume that @math has conductance at least @math . We assume that the degrees of nodes don't change over time as one can show that the consensus time can become super-exponential otherwise. In the case of a sequence of @math -regular graphs, we obtain asymptotically tight results. Even for some static graphs, such as the cycle, our results improve the state of the art. Here we show that the expected number of rounds until all nodes have the same opinion is bounded by @math , for any graph with @math edges, conductance @math , and degrees at least @math . In addition, we consider a biased dynamic voter model, where each opinion @math is associated with a probability @math , and when a node chooses a neighbour with that opinion, it adopts opinion @math with probability @math (otherwise the node keeps its current opinion). We show for any regular dynamic graph, that if there is an @math difference between the highest and second highest opinion probabilities, and at least @math nodes have initially the opinion with the highest probability, then all nodes adopt w.h.p. that opinion. We obtain a bound on the convergences time, which becomes @math for static graphs.
Distributed voting is a fundamental topic in distributed computing. In pull voting, in each step every vertex chooses a neighbour uniformly at random, and adopts its opinion. The voting is completed when all vertices hold the same opinion. On many graph classes including regular graphs, pull voting requires Ω(n) expected steps to complete, even if initially there are only two distinct opinions.  Distributed voting is a fundamental topic in distributed computing. In the standard model of pull voting, at each step every vertex chooses a neighbour uniformly at random and adopts its opinion. The voting is completed when all vertices hold the same opinion. In the simplest case, each vertex initially holds one of two different opinions. This partitions the vertices into arbitrary sets A and B. For many graphs, including regular graphs and irrespective of their expansion properties, if both A and B are sufficiently large sets, then pull voting requires @math expected steps, where n is the number of vertices of the graph. In this paper we consider a related class of voting processes based on sampling two opinions. In the simplest case, every vertex v chooses two random neighbours at each step. If both these neighbours have the same opinion, then v adopts this opinion. Otherwise, v keeps its own opinion. Let G be a connected graph with n vertices and m edges. Let P be the transition matrix of a simple random walk on G with second largest eigenvalue @math . We show that if the initial imbalance in degree between the two opinions satisfies @math , then with high probability voting completes in @math steps, and the opinion with the larger initial degree wins. The condition that @math , or only a bound on the conductance of the graph is known, the sampling process can be modified so that voting still provably completes in @math steps with high probability. The modification uses two sampling based on probing to a fixed depth @math from any vertex. In its most general form our voting process allows vertices to bias their sampling of opinions among their neighbours to achieve a desired outcome. This is done by allocating weights to edges. Suppose in a graph G vertices can be either red or blue. Let k be odd. At each time step, each vertex v in G polls k random neighbours and takes the majority colour. If it does not have k neighbours, it simply polls all of them, or all less one if the degree of v is even. We study this protocol on graphs of a given degree sequence, in the following setting: initially each vertex of G is red independently with probability α < 1 2 , and is otherwise blue. We show that if α is sufficiently biased, then with high probability consensus is reached on the initial global majority within O ( log k log k n ) steps if 5 ? k ? d , and O ( log d log d n ) steps if k d . Here, d ? 5 is the effective minimum degree, the smallest integer which occurs ? ( n ) times in the degree sequence. We further show that on such graphs, any local protocol in which a vertex does not change colour if all its neighbours have that same colour, takes time at least ? ( log d log d n ) , with high probability. Additionally, we demonstrate how the technique for the above sparse graphs can be applied in a straightforward manner to get bounds for the Erd?s-Renyi random graphs in the connected regime. In this paper, we consider lightweight decentralised algorithms for achieving consensus in distributed systems. Each member of a distributed group has a private value from a fixed set consisting of, say, two elements, and the goal is for all members to reach consensus on the majority value. We explore variants of the voter model applied to this problem. In the voter model, each node polls a randomly chosen group member and adopts its value. The process is repeated until consensus is reached. We generalise this so that each member polls a (deterministic or random) number of other group members and changes opinion only if a suitably defined super-majority has a different opinion. We show that this modification greatly speeds up the convergence of the algorithm, as well as substantially reducing the probability of it reaching consensus on the incorrect value.