This is live.
I've reviewed the request and your recent history and I can definitely see that this will likely benefit the site. Thanks for your patience while we got to the place we could make this change.
To determine whether to make this change, I used a few queries - firstly, I like to see what percentage of questions that get at least one flag or vote to close get handled - either closed or marked "leave open".
The first thing I like to note is that the graph vertical axis is 0-90%, so it can look a bit higher than it is. In general, y'all aren't usually able to get most of the questions handled. While this has changed over time, it seems that you're generally sitting around 50% handled, which means a lot of them are aging out of review. The end result of this is that the site can have a lot of content that should have been closed that sits around cluttering things up.
I'll also note that you have a pretty decent "leave open" result (~10% at times) - many sites don't seem to have such a high percentage (generally closer to 1-5%) - it's not bad but it could indicate there's some disagreement amongst voters about what's close-worthy. As such, it's possible that if more reviews were completed, those questions might actually be left open - it's difficult to know.
The other thing I check for is whether the moderators are doing an outsized volume of the close reviewing - this can indicate that they're doing more than they're necessarily expected to do. While there are many things mods need to handle, reviewing isn't one that we generally include in that. They're certainly welcome to participate but - because of their unilateral close privileges, it means that reopening questions can be significantly harder without moderator participation.
That said, it looks like, in general, the moderators aren't usually doing the bulk of the closures here, so it's not a concern. Over the last year, it looks like they're participating in about a quarter of the closures on average.
If you're interested in which votes are being cast by mods, you can see that below - I made it for a shorter period of time because it makes it a bit easier to see the lines.
As this shows, mods don't seem to be more likely to cast fifth votes over any other and, in some cases, have cast many first votes - which is understandable! All-in-all, it seems pretty even.
So, the end result is, we'd love to see the percentage of reviews handled increase here and it looks like reducing the votes needed to close and reopen from 5 to 3 will help with that. Because the tests on other sites went generally well, y'all can consider this permanent - at least until you ask us to change it again. I'll check back in a few months but, unless there's something huge to report, I probably won't update things. If you have any questions or want to see how things are going, feel free to let me know.
