Voting protocols on the star graph

Let \(G=(V,E)\) be a finite graph together with an initial assignment \(V\rightarrow \{0,1\}\) that represents the opinion of each vertex. Then discordant push voting is a discrete, non-deterministic protocol that alters the opinion of one vertex at a time until a consensus is reached. More precisely, at each round a discordant vertex u (i.e., one that has a neighbor with a different opinion) is chosen uniformly at random, and then we choose a neighbor v with different vote uniformly at random, and force v to change its opinion to that of u. In case of the discordant pull protocol we simply choose a discordant vertex uniformly at random and change its opinion. In this paper, we give asymptotically sharp estimations for the worst expected runtime of the discordant push and pull protocols on the star graph.