In distributed computing, leader election is the process of designating a single process as the organizer of some task distributed among several computers (nodes).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leader_election
Bully algorithm by Garcia-Molina (1982)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bully_algorithm
Token-Ring election algorithm by Chang & Robert (1979)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang_and_Roberts_algorithm