First, moderator votes are always binding. There's no "vote to close."

Moderators have a difficult task, particularly early in the site's development. In philosophy, they are asked to act with great restraint, acting only as the human exception handler for egregious problems.

On the other hand  — particularly early on — moderators are asked to act quickly (as a sort of community self-moderation by proxy) when there are not enough members to perform routine decision making. I try — as best as I am able to determine these things — to pick users who have an above-average understanding of the philosophy that drives these sites. Most often moderators have to act decisively in the interest of keeping the site from going off in the wrong direction; fixing broken windows quickly:

Broken Window: It’s pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and the transformation was equally dramatic.

But moderators are not perfect; they can make mistakes, misread the situation, or simply be on the minority side of an opinion. If a binding vote does not seem in the best interest of the site, raise the issue in meta. That is one of the primary purposes of meta. But be considerate and be respectful. Some issues simply have no wide-spread consensus, and sometimes you simply have to concede and agree to disagree.

First, moderator votes are always binding. There's no "vote to close."

Moderators have a difficult task, particularly early in the site's development. Philosophically speaking, they are asked to act with great restraint, acting only as the human exception handler for egregious problems.

On the other hand  — particularly early on — moderators are asked to act quickly and decisively (as a sort of community self-moderation by proxy) when there are not enough members to perform routine policing and cleanup duties. I try — as best as I am able to determine these things — to pick users who have an above-average understanding of the philosophy that drives these sites. Most often moderators have to act decisively in the interest of keeping the site from going off in the wrong direction; fixing broken windows quickly:

Broken Window: It’s pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and the transformation was equally dramatic.

But moderators are not perfect; they can make mistakes, misread the situation, or simply be on the minority side of an opinion. If a binding vote does not seem in the best interest of the site, raise the issue in meta. That is one of the primary purposes of meta. But be considerate and be respectful. Some issues simply have no wide-spread consensus, and sometimes you simply have to concede and agree to disagree.