A short technical paper: Determining whether a vote assignment is dominated

Abstract One way to achieve mutual exclusion in a distributed system is to assign votes to each site in the system. If the total number of votes is odd, the assignment is known to be nondominated, meaning that no other assignment can provide strictly greater access and still achieve mutual exclusion. We characterize in this note dominated even-totaled vote assignments. As a consequence, we obtain that the problem of determining whether an even-totaled vote assignment is dominated is trivial if each site is assigned exactly one vote; however, the problem is NP-complete in general.