Why don't close votes reset on a question when the review ends?

Question

This discussion had started in chat. And I thought I'd move it here.

This question currently has 4 close votes. I had previously reviewed it and selected "Leave Open". The review ended with 3 "Leave Open" votes and 1 "Close" vote.

Now I know when voting to close a question outside the review queue, the vote doesn't show in the review. But since the review ended as "Leave Open", why don't those 4 close votes get reset as well?

Answer 1

They don't reset immediately. They begin to age away immediately, however, and in ~1 week or so, will be gone. From this Meta SE post:

[W]hen the aging task fires it just looks at every post that has at least 100 views where all outstanding close votes are older than 4 days, and every post where all outstanding close votes are older than 14 days regardless of the view count.

Then it deletes the oldest close vote. A day later, it runs again and does the same thing, until either another close vote shows up, or all the close votes are deleted.

...

[If] you get enough "Leave Open" or "Leave Closed" votes to complete the review, that also starts the aging process immediately - so four days after the last close or reopen vote was cast, they'll start getting deleted at the rate of one per day until they're all gone or a new one is added.

Also note that "leave open" votes don't "cancel" close votes. No matter how many leave open votes the post got, it still needs only 5 normal close votes (not counting dupehammers, mod votes, agreeing to dupe, etc.).

Answer 2

This is not per se a defense of the specific details of the current system, because there are several designs that I think could work well, and the current design is not necessarily optimal. With that said...

You should be much more willing to do things that have the effect of kicking a question from the Close queue than to reset the existing close votes.

• If you cannot tell how a review item should be handled, or just feel like skipping it, then of course you can always click Skip, but...
• If the evidence to support closure is insufficient and you don't know of any separate reason to close, vote Leave Open...
• Unless an edit would make the lack of support for closure more apparent, in which case you should click Edit.
• If the question would qualify for closure but you can fix the problems by editing instead, click Edit.
• If the question qualifies for closure, either for the reasons suggested so far or for another reason, click Close. Even if it looks like the OP can edit it to fix the problem, you should still click Close unless, perhaps, you know such an edit is immediately forthcoming (in which case you could click Skip).

Enough Leave Open reviews drop an item from the queue. A single Edit review drops the item from review. You should be willing to perform these actions when they are appropriate, even if you suspect that later the question might need to be closed, and even if you find yourself in disagreement with other users. If close votes were immediately cleared from questions when they left the Close queue, then you would likely not be willing enough to do those things. The ironic result might be that more questions would be wrongly closed.