A node within a group of participant nodes begins an election by sending a vote request to the other nodes in the group. The vote request sets an input term argument to a future term value without incrementing the actual current term value. The current term value at each participant node is only incremented in response to a successful leadership change. At startup time, a candidate node issues a vote request with a non-disruptive election type. An established leader automatically rejects a non-disruptive vote request. A heartbeat loss vote request is rejected by each receiving node if its own heartbeat timeout does not exceed a predetermined limit. A mandatory vote request informs the leader node that it should stop requesting new workload. This is used in manual leadership transition to make sure that the old leader does not accept new transactions during the leadership transition.