LeaderPinDenial

This node has spent a sustained run dropping same-term leader→peer frames because the term is already pinned to a different node — the per-term leader pin (#1906) refusing everything the node it established did not send (#2674).

This changes no decision, like WedgeSuspected: §5.2 Election Safety permits one leader per term, so two same-term senders mean one is forged, and which one is not locally decidable. Read this as "I am refusing everything pinnedLeader did not send", never as "pinnedLeader is hostile" — on the honest reading pinnedLeader simply got there first and refusedSender is the real leader; on the hostile one it is the other way round, and nothing in this node's state separates them.

Why it is not a WedgeSuspected

It reports the same kind of condition — a node that can no longer be reached — from a different place, and the two cannot share a counter. WedgeSuspected is raised by the two gates at the engine's dispatch boundary, whose run is reset by any leader→peer frame that clears both of them; every frame reaching this refusal has cleared both by definition, so a report built on that counter can never fire here (measured: 5001 refusals, zero metrics). The identities differ too: a wedge report names the possibly-stale voter set doing the refusing, which is meaningless here — what a reader needs is who is pinned and who is being refused.

Latched once per pin epoch

Emitted once per (term, pinnedLeader) pair. Everything it carries is a function of that pair, and the pin is write-once within a term, so one emission is exactly one denial episode. A finer latch would be a log-amplification lever handed to the peer this refusal contains. Re-arming needs this node's term to move — and once it is above the honest leader's, that leader's frames take the §5.1 stale-term reply instead of this gate, so an extra report costs a full cluster term advance, which is also the only thing that ends the denial.

What to do about one

Nothing self-heals. If refusedSender is in fact the cluster's leader, this node cannot be caught up in place: bring it back as a genuinely new member — a fresh NodeId over empty storage, admitted by an ordinary single-server membership change. ⚠ Never wipe storage under the same NodeId — it returns having forgotten a term it already voted in and votes again, which is two leaders in one term.