Why can't I vote to reopen the question which doesn't have any reopen votes and was closed only once?

Question

As I understand the process:

• A non-moderator can vote to reopen a question, which will appear in the question links as:

  Share | Edit | Reopen (1) | Delete ...

• A person can vote to reopen a given question only once,

• A question may have been closed, reopened, then closed again, making it appear as having zero reopen votes, but preventing the same person to vote to reopen it again.

According to the revisions of a question, it has been closed only once; it has zero reopen votes. And still, when I try to reopen it, I see the following error:

You have already voted to reopen this question

How could it be?

Is the revision history not showing all the close and reopen events?

If it was just closed once, then why does the counter say nobody voted to reopen the question?

Answer 1

What probably happened is you voted to re-open at some point and your vote expired (~ there wasn't another re-open vote for four days). There's no visible trace of expired votes, so this is more of an educated guess. Unfortunately you can't re-cast an expired vote.

Related (on Meta Stack Exchange):

• Why do close votes expire?
• Close Votes expire too soon for low-traffic tags
• Bogus “You have already voted to close this question” on expired votes
• Please allow expired close/open votes to be re-cast

Answer 2

The revision history of a question doesn't show the things that were tried but failed (or are in progress) - be it close, reopen, delete, or undelete votes.

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On your profile, you can go to 'votes' and then 'reopen':

On this page, you can see all of the reopen votes you have cast in the past along with the question. The questions where it shows (deleted) have been deleted and are no longer active (either expired or acted upon).

Lets look at one that I've voted to reopen in the past that is still closed (in the name of science!).

Clicking on reopen there gives the standard modal popup:

And then the red box:

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Now, certainly the information could be done better (like it is for close votes - where it shows when you tried rather than getting the red box of disappointment, or delete votes - where the mouseover for the 'delete' shows "you have already voted to delete this").

However, with the information about where to look, you can see that, yes, this was attempted to be reopened at some point in the past.