AbstractMobile and other loosely coupled environments call for decentralized optimistic replication protocols that provide highly available access to shared objects, while ensuring eventual consistency. We propose a protocol based on epidemic weighted voting for achieving such a goal with better availability than traditional primary commit approaches. We improve previous epidemic weighted voting solutions by allowing commitment of multiple, happened‐before related updates at a single distributed election round. We demonstrate that our protocol, in contrast to basic weighted voting solutions, achieves similar update commitment ratios to the primary commit alternative. The improvement over basic weighted voting is especially amplified with weaker replica connectivity, as in mobile and other loosely coupled environments. We support such claims by presenting comparison performance results obtained from side‐by‐side execution of reference protocols in a simulated environment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.