I observed a 7.12 cluster that was struggling to complete an election, with at least one node holding over a million `elected-as-master` tasks in its pending task queue. I suspect there were two such nodes because they were just constantly winning elections and then failing because of the next election and so on...

It's currently unclear exactly how we got into this state, but it doesn't seem completely impossible if something else causes a bunch of spurious elections somehow while the master service was blocked. There were some faulty nodes involved for sure.

In any case I believe we can and should take steps to avoid processing stale `elected-as-master` tasks.
server/src/test/java/org/elasticsearch/indices/cluster/ClusterStateChanges.java
/*
 * Copyright Elasticsearch B.V. and/or licensed to Elasticsearch B.V. under one
 * or more contributor license agreements. Licensed under the Elastic License
 * 2.0 and the Server Side Public License, v 1; you may not use this file except
 * in compliance with, at your election, the Elastic License 2.0 or the Server
 * Side Public License, v 1.
 */
package org.elasticsearch.indices.cluster;
import org.elasticsearch.ExceptionsHelper;
import org.elasticsearch.Version;
import org.elasticsearch.action.ActionListener;
import org.elasticsearch.action.ActionRequest;
import org.elasticsearch.action.ActionResponse;
import org.elasticsearch.action.ActionType;
import org.elasticsearch.action.admin.cluster.reroute.ClusterRerouteRequest;
import org.elasticsearch.action.admin.cluster.reroute.TransportClusterRerouteAction;
import org.elasticsearch.action.admin.indices.close.CloseIndexRequest;
import org.elasticsearch.action.admin.indices.close.CloseIndexResponse;
import org.elasticsearch.action.admin.indices.close.TransportVerifyShardBeforeCloseAction;
import org.elasticsearch.action.admin.indices.create.CreateIndexRequest;
import org.elasticsearch.action.admin.indices.create.TransportCreateIndexAction;
import org.elasticsearch.action.admin.indices.delete.DeleteIndexRequest;
import org.elasticsearch.action.admin.indices.delete.TransportDeleteIndexAction;
import org.elasticsearch.action.admin.indices.open.OpenIndexRequest;
import org.elasticsearch.action.admin.indices.open.TransportOpenIndexAction;