algorithm for close-votings needs to be revised

Question

When ever someone thinks that a question should be closed, he/she clicks on »close« and starts the close-voting-process for this question.

Then everybody who has enough privileges can enter the review-page and see this question in the close-queue. And when ever someone clicks on »close«, the close-counter is increased (when it was 2 before the user voted to close, then it is 3 afterwards). When this counter reaches 5 the voting is over and the question will be closed. This all is ok and fine.

But since I think, that lots of question sent to the close-queue should left open, I very often don't vote for »close«, but for »leave open«. And when I do so, I expect the close-counter to decrease. So when it was 2 before and I voted to leave it open, then it should be 1 afterwards.

But nothing happens. When ever I vote for »leave open« my vote is ignored. The close-counter stays where it was and also everything else stays unchanged. So my leave-open-vote is ignored.

I think that this is a bug that needs to be corrected. Because when there is a group of minimum 5 people, who from habit and without really thinking, every time vote for close when they see a question in the close-queue, then even 100 leave-open voters can't prevent them from closing every single question that someone sent to this queue. They always win, just because they are 5. And when you have a look on the users who voted to close questions, you will find a small group of names in almost every close-list.

So, please talk also into account leave-open-votes and decrease the close-counter when someone votes to leave a question open.

Answer 1

Whenever a questions receives a close vote it will enter the review queue which was created to help users with community moderation.

In this reviews we have a limited set of actions, basically we can only:

• also vote to close which increases the close vote number and helps to get questions closed early.
• edit a post to improve it. This will immediately remove the post from the review queue but it will not reduce the number of votes that had already been cast.
• skip this review in case we are not sure, or just have not enough time to read all of the post.
• recommend to leave open. This will not reduce them number of close votes cast from others but it will help to get the post out of the review queue in case other users feel the same.

At present there are no plans to change this behavior because we believe that high reputation users who gained the privilege to cast close votes are familiar with the site's policy and will show enough responsibility before they cast their votes.

In case you feel that the close votes are cast too often, or that a post got unfairly closed you should cast your reopen vote, discuss the matter in meta, or flag this post for moderator support.

Answer 2

Every single close vote was a user saying this question does not fit within the scope of this Stack Exchange site for the reason following.

Stack Exchange’s policy is to close a question if five community votes are gathered, or a moderator votes to close or a user with a golden badge in the respective tag votes to close (as a duplicate only).

Since every single close vote is the expression of a user’s freedom of speech, voting to ‘leave open’ should not reduce the close voting count. Doing so would effectively mean:

Sorry mate, you might have had good reasons but my vote will randomly cancel out your vote.

Remember that close voting is not a proportional representing vote (‘Verhältniswahl’) but rather a first-past-the-post system. It does not even scale with the size of the community but rather remains at five votes for both, a newly-opened beta and Stack Overflow.

On the other side, you can immediately vote to reopen a question if you feel it was closed prematurely or incorrectly.

In all cases, you should probably leave a comment on why you disagree with the close/reopen voting. Only that way will the other users know what you meant.