Why can't you vote to leave open after previously voting to close and reopen?

Question

Here's an interesting scenario:

A question was closed as off-topic. I voted to reopen it and it was eventually reopened. However, in the process of getting reopened the question was edited. I closed the edited question as a duplicate of a different question, and another user reopened it (both of us have gold tag badges). The question was then rolled back several times, until it was back in the form that had been closed as off-topic.

At this point someone voted to close it again as off-topic, and here's where it gets interesting. Normally, once you vote to close a question and it gets closed, or you vote to reopen a question and it gets reopened, you can no longer cast that same vote. Since I had already voted to close this question (as a duplicate) I no longer had the ability to cast a vote to close it as off-topic. However, I was also prevented from voting to leave it open as not off-topic.

Why am I unable to vote to leave this question open? I can think of two possible reasons:

1. I already voted to close it and it was closed.
2. I already voted to reopen it and it was reopened.

Yet neither of these reasons seem so logical. I voted to close the question for a different reason, so why should I not be able to vote that the current reason does not apply? (I suppose this could be tested by finding a case where someone voted to close and the question was closed and then it was reopened by other users and then sent to the Close Queue for a different reason.) If I can even vote to actually reopen a question that I have participated in closing, I should a fortiori be able to merely vote to leave open a question I participated in closing.

And if it's because I reopened the question, why should I lose my leave open vote? In general, when you are involved in closing or reopening a question you can still vote to leave the question the way it is if it comes up in the queue again. So the fact that my reopen vote succeeded should not be a reason for me to lose my leave open vote.

And if neither one of the above factors is a good reason for me to lose my leave open vote then the combination of them should also not remove my ability to vote.

(I tagged this as support because I want to know why the system is set up this way. If it turns out that there's no good reason, I suppose it can be changed to bug or feature-request.)

Answer 1

If you've already cast a close vote, you can't cast any further close votes on that question, and so it won't let you review in the Close Votes queue. (Reopen has nothing to do with it.)

On the one hand, you could argue that this is an oversight, since it is still potentially useful to Leave Open, and any items that should be closed can simply be skipped by those who already voted to close them once.

On the other hand, skipping is all too infrequent, and this therefore seems likely to lead to quite a few mistaken Leave Open votes, proportionally.

Reflecting on the actual prevalence leads to the inevitable conclusion: this is too rare a corner case to really be worth fixing. Most questions that were closed once by you don't need to be kept open by you specifically. If they're worth keeping open, they'll probably manage it one way or another. If not, time for meta!

Answer 2

"Voting to leave open" isn't really a vote on the closure of the question: no amount of "leave open" voting will keep a question from being closed if it accumulates the necessary number of close votes. Rather, it's a vote to kick the question out of the "close votes" review queue.

You've already cast your close vote and your reopen vote, so there's nothing left for you to do with the question.

See What exactly happens with the button "Leave Open" (previously "Do Not Close")?