Confused by the 'reopen' process

Question

Recently this question — Is the “Defund the police”-argument anti-police or not? — was closed. I thought the question was salvageable and voted to reopen, as did three others for a total of four:

Yet when the question came up for review, it remained closes on a 3:1 count, per the history link:

Needless to say, the numbers do not add up, so some other thing must be going on that I am unaware of. I never saw this 'reopen' question appear in my review queue (is 14K rep insufficient?), no discussion was held on the question comments or any other place that I could discover; the process appeared to be arbitrary and officious, and I'd appreciate it if someone could clarify what actually happened.

I'm happy to discuss why the article ought to be reopened, though I think the answer I gave shows that it's possible to respond to such questions in a neutral and informative (if somewhat pedantic) tone. But here I'm more concerned with the inner political workings of Politics Stack Exchange than the question itself, so please answer with that in mind. I don't 'get' how decisions are made on this site, and I'd prefer to be better informed.

Thanks in advance for clarifying.

EDIT

I'm beginning to get a handle on how the system works (per my discussion below with Glorfindel, whom I thank), but I have to say that I dislike it. It seems anyone who wants to reopen a question is forced to vote strategically; they can either:

• Vote on the page to put the question on the reopen queue, which bars them from any further action, or...
• Hope that other people vote to put the question on the reopen queue, so that they can participate in the actual discussion and vote on reopening.

This puts a strong bias against reopening questions (since those who want to reopen have to strategically allocate their votes). In this case, for instance, my correct move was not to vote for reopen on the page (since there were already three votes), so that I would be allowed to vote on the review queue. But that's not explained anywhere that I know of, and I can't see the sense or logic behind it at all (unless the intention is explicitly to make reopen votes more difficult to accomplish).

Was the process intentionally designed to have this effect, or is it an unintented consequence? Or is it all happenstance (e.g., a process that sounded good on paper but doesn't work quite right in practice)?

Answer 1

The wording is confusing, but reopen votes and the reopen review queue are actually 2 separate things.

A question gets reopened when it gets sufficient reopen votes. To enable improved or improperly closed questions to get reopened, certain actions get the question put into the reopen queue to get additional attention. In the queue, people can review the question and decided to either: 1) vote to reopen (which counts as a reopen vote) or 2) vote to "Leave Closed".

If a question gets 3 "Leave Closed" votes, it gets removed from the reopen queue and "reopen" votes will start to expire immediately at a rate of 1 per day.. However, reopen votes remain and people can still vote to reopen it. It doesn't get super-closed, it just means that it won't be highlighted for review.

So in this case, the decision by the 3 "Leave Closed" voters resulted in the question being removed from the reopen queue, but if people reading the question disagree (or who get linked to it from by a meta post), they can still vote to reopen.

Answer 2

I never saw this 'reopen' question appear in my review queue

That's because you already voted to reopen it. This started the review task, which is to be performed by others, as all review tasks in the system do.

Three 'Leave Closed' reviews complete a Reopen Votes review queue task (just like three 'Leave Open' reviews complete a Close Votes review queue task). That means those users have decided (3:1) that the question doesn't get reopened via the review queue; it's still possible that it will be reopened, but only if another user happens to view the question and votes to reopen it.

Answer 3

You aren’t understanding the process.

For a question to be reopened, five reopen votes (or one reopen vote by a diamond mod) need to be applied to the question.

There are two ways a question can receive reopen votes:

1. Someone navigates to the actual question page and clicks the little reopen link (the one with the (4) in your image)

2. Someone sees the question in the reopen queue and clicks reopen

These two ways of casting reopen votes are identical! There is no difference between a queue-vote and a question-page vote. Five positive votes of any kind will reopen the question.

If you have voted on the question page, you can no longer access the review queue for this question. Likewise, if you voted through the queue you cannot cast an additional vote from the page.

So what does the queue do? It is designed as a way to get additional eyes on a question – facilitate the reopening if you wish. After the first reopen vote is dropped, the question enters the queue until review is completed. The review can be completed in one of two ways:

1. The question receives a total of five reopen votes/one by a diamond moderator (it does not matter whether these were dropped via the queue or the question page) and is thereby reopened;

2. Three people in the review queue vote to leave closed (this is what you see in the second image).

The review queue is not a democratic vote. It exists purely to guide additional pairs of eyes to questions that might require votes.

The only caveat here is that reopen votes start expiring after the review ended with a leave close vote (see divibisan’s answer). The expiration is slow but is meant to prevent a question sitting at four votes for months and then getting a fifth vote randomly. Reopening is intended to be a rather rapid process.

The same process applies to close votes (except it is called leave open and the review queue has an edit field with a slightly different effect).