It's possible to retract and re-cast a delete vote on answers, contrary to the tooltip's advice

Question

When retracting a delete vote, the following popup is displayed:

To quote the text directly:

rpg.stackexchange.com says

Retract your vote to delete? You won't be able to vote again on this post.

This, however, is inaccurate, or it's at least inaccurate for me, right now. Your delete vote can be retracted and reapplied on answers only (delete votes on questions behave normally). This is just a formal request to have this fixed, as the ability to vote to delete and undelete was changed to only be allowed once per post per vote type.

Answer 1

This has been fixed in production.

Thanks to all the folks who brought this to our attention, both here and privately via chat.

The edge case was introduced a couple months ago when handling voting to delete a question after it has been reopened and reclosed where we checked if the most recent delete vote was more recent than the post closure date. However, answer posts don't have a closure date, so when comparing DateTime.Now > null, it evaluates to false and made it seem like the close vote was from a previous close/re-open cycle.

I did some queries to assess impact. We have at most 133 cases of multiple delete votes per user per post across all sites. Of those, only 12 voted to delete the same post more than 2 times – so most were likely accidental usages with little/no impact. And of those 12 with >2 votes, most were from users who had pro-actively reached out to us to let us know or were testing in sandbox.

We'll review the other cases to make sure there's no impact to users, but should be all set otherwise.