  Leader election is, together with consensus, one of the most central problems
in distributed computing. This paper presents a distributed algorithm, called
\STT, for electing deterministically a leader in an arbitrary network, assuming
processors have unique identifiers of size $O(\log n)$, where $n$ is the number
of processors. It elects a leader in $O(D +\log n)$ rounds, where $D$ is the
diameter of the network, with messages of size $O(1)$. Thus it has a bit round
complexity of $O(D +\log n)$. This substantially improves upon the best known
algorithm whose bit round complexity is $O(D\log n)$. In fact, using the lower
bound by Kutten et al. (2015) and a result of Dinitz and Solomon (2007), we
show that the bit round complexity of \STT is optimal (up to a constant
factor), which is a significant step forward in understanding the interplay
between time and message optimality for the election problem. Our algorithm
requires no knowledge on the graph such as $n$ or $D$, and the pipelining
technique we introduce to break the $O(D\log n)$ barrier is general.
