I would like to elevate a variation of a comment from 2012 to a feature request:
I think the formula (for removing a question from review - ed.) should change from 3 to 3 + numReopenVotes. Otherwise, if 4 people think it should be reopened, and 3 people don't, it still disappears. Unless that's your desired behavior. Because the votes expire if it's not reopened, it wouldn't remain indefinitely.
Currently, on sites that have a five vote threshold for closure and reopening, a question is removed from the review queue if it has three 'opposing' votes. If a question in the Reopen queue gets three "Leave closed" votes then this shows on the post as "submitted for review and failed to reopen".
This works fine for questions where there is consensus and the first three votes are to leave closed (or leave open in the close vote queue). However, if the votes are split then the question is removed from the queue while it has pending reopen votes, as also mentioned in Six reopen votes cast resulted in tie with question remaining closed. That question asks how it works, I request to have this behavior changed.
The issue is that the current behavior is asymmetric: you need five votes to reopen and three to remove from the queue. When a question is removed from the queue the reopen votes are still there, however it becomes much harder to get the final 1 or 2 votes because people don't see the question anymore unless you specifically ask about it in chat (or with a moderator flag, but they are not really meant for this) or if people happen to come across the question, read it despite the fact that it is closed, and decide to add a reopen vote. So in practise: 3 votes to remain closed, 5 to reopen.
This could be changed, on sites with a five vote threshold, to keep a question in the queue until the number of leaveClosedVotes reaches either 3+numReopenVotes (for 0 or 1 reopen votes) or five (for 2, 3 or 4 reopen votes).
The result would be that the community actually gets to complete the discussion on what to do with a question by majority. Currently a leave closed-reopen vote of 3-3 or 3-4 completes the discussion in favor of leave closed, which doesn't seem correct. In the new proposal the vote goes to either 5-4 to leave closed or 4-5 to reopen in the most split opinion cases, which is an actual majority. For consensus reviews it would still be 3-0 and the question is removed from the queue quickly.
