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The statistics is available for users with sufficient rep, but not everyone can see what happens behind the scenes, so here's a screenshot.

enter image description here

I'm not concerned with the number of questions closed by tchrist, who is ELU's mod, many of the questions closed were well deserved and a few were left open. I am, however, very surprised by the number of questions reviewed. Have I been sleeping under a rock all these weeks? Is this typical?

I thought there was a daily limit, a maximum of twenty reviews then SE blocked users from continuing. It's happened to me many a time, you get into the swing of things and then -BANG- I'm blocked and I can't review until the next day. Personally, I think twenty questions is too low a number, and experienced users, if so inclined, should be allowed to handle a greater "workload" But isn't 82 reviews too many for any user?

I've tried digging in SE Meta to find an answer, and I discovered that Stack Overflow users can close up to 40 questions per day. Is it the same for EL&U users? Has this limit been increased, and are mods exempt from this limit?

What are the limits on how I can cast, change, and retract votes?

EDIT

Today, I went through the review queue to see what my limit was

enter image description here

It says: Thank you for reviewing 20 close votes today; come back in 13 hours to continue reviewing.

But tchrist's answer suggests that that number is 24. I don't understand.

We should probably be like the way that the more trafficked sites and each have 40 close votes per day, not the current 24.

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    I believe, yes, mods are exempt from this limit. It wouldn't be very helpful for mods to have the same constraints as non-mods: what would be the point? That said, I can neither affirm nor challenge the question of whether the 82 reflects the use of mod powers or is due to some other reason.
    – Dan Bron
    Commented Mar 5, 2017 at 18:22
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    @DanBron yessss... but when a mod casts their vote to close a question that's it. The question is automatically closed. It's pushing the envelope ever so slightly. I know mods can close questions unilaterally, and I'm fine with that but... 82.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Mar 5, 2017 at 18:28
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    I'm very happy with the uptick in moderation (in particular, speedy closures of elementary questions!) since Tom donned the diamond mantle. I don't agree with all his closures (he's too speedy with the hammer on "pejorative" questions and not speedy enough on certain other janitorial work), but on balance, it's a significant improvement. Whether his behavior accords with SE's broader diamond-mod guidelines, I'll leave to others to analyze, but I will note there's a broad diversity in diamond moderation across different stacks. The mods on Skeptics do almost all the closures, e.g.
    – Dan Bron
    Commented Mar 5, 2017 at 18:34
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    (Tom was also top-ranked in closures long before his election, if that helps.)
    – Dan Bron
    Commented Mar 5, 2017 at 18:35
  • @DanBron so this leap is not new, it's something you had already noticed?
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Mar 5, 2017 at 18:49
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    No, what I mean to say is the modus operandi is not new, but it may have been given new force with tchrist's election. In other words, it's perfectly consistent with the behavior he'd exhibited before the community elected him, which behavior was publicly visible to all voters (which is how I know it: he's been too-ranked in the public close-vote list since least when I joined, 2-3 years ago). Before his election, of course, he was limited to X votes/day, like the rest of us. Now he isn't, but that's all that's changed.
    – Dan Bron
    Commented Mar 5, 2017 at 18:53
  • @DanBron I know, and I appreciate that tchrist has always been an active member. I am also among the top reviewers, so I do my little bit when it comes to closing or keeping questions open. I'm asking, whether you were aware that mods were exempt from this limit. I understand they have increased responsibilities, and they have been chosen by the community because we respect their judgment and contributions, but I didn't know they could close over 80 questions on a daily basis. Did you?
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Mar 5, 2017 at 18:59
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    Without knowing for sure, I would have assumed the number of moderation actions a diamond mod could take per day would be unlimited, yes. That's the major difference between diamond mods and 25K+ members, as far as I'm aware, plus some additional powers and more visibility into information not available to non-diamond users.
    – Dan Bron
    Commented Mar 5, 2017 at 19:01

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The direct answer is that yes, moderators can cast unlimited numbers of votes to close, reopen, delete, or undelete posts because these are considered moderation activities. You must just have been unaware of this, but it has always been that way. Actual votes are still limited in the normal way, however.

Most of the time I don’t use the review queues for casting my votes, but today the queue was really high, so working the queue directly was the most efficient way to address this. I did a variety of things while running the queue, including not just closing but also skipping, editing, migrating, voting to leave open, and commenting. In a few cases I changed the close reason or edited the duplicate list. Just a lot of maintenance, really, stuff that needed getting done. See here for details. In very few cases was mine the only close vote, and in many mine was the fourth or fifth. If you disagree with something, please feel free to speak up. I might even agree with you. :)

I don’t believe I’ve ever blown much past the more customary daily 20 reviews before, let alone by a couple of doubles. I did so today because the review queues had been swelling into the triple digits again. This is happening because the posting rate is much higher than the reviewing rate.

We should probably be like the way that the more trafficked sites and each have 40 close votes per day, not the current 24. There’s also a proposal under review by the Powers That Be to scale the number of close votes per day by reputation up to some reasonable finite limit like 100 or 200. (In which case I’d likely be at 80–100 just by reputation alone. 😉 But even if that proposal does get implemented we’d still need more people reviewing, which is a lot more important than how many votes someone has, because it's the only thing that's sustainable, the only thing that scales, and the only thing that doesn’t risk burning somebody out.

I haven’t pitched bumping us to 40 a day yet because I was waiting for the other proposal to see some movement in 6–8 time-units. Our long-term close percentage seems to have levelled out at about 60%, which really is quite high compared to most other sites on the network, so I’ve also been thinking about several other specific things we could consider doing to help improve the experience for all these first-time posters who continually post low-quality questions. However, that hasn't gelled into a concrete proposal yet.

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    You've been a busy bee! // Re your last paragraph -- I'd like to see an optional question wizard, which could be strongly recommended for newbies. OPs should be prompted to supply a sample sentence, for example.
    – aparente001
    Commented Mar 6, 2017 at 7:05
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    Could you please explain the discrepancy between the 24 VTC cited by you, and elsewhere on SEMeta, and the 20 VTC limit that I personally confirmed this morning. What am I missing?I still can't review a single question, you'd think after ten hours the "review fatigue" would have worn out by now.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Mar 6, 2017 at 21:22
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    @Mari-LouA Because the max-reviews and the max-VTC are not the same. A site either has 20/24 or 40/50. We have 20/24. The busier sites have 40/50, but I do think a reasonable argument can be made that we should have 40/50.
    – tchrist Mod
    Commented Mar 6, 2017 at 23:30
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    Please just go ask the CMs for 40/50. I personally loathe the close queue and dread visiting it, but I do it anyway because otherwise we just get inundated with unresearched or subjective junk. I usually hit the "thanks for reviewing 20 close votes today" limit with a serious sigh of relief, and this will delay that 2x, but in my view, it's got to be done. Until we can implement a system which prevents bad questions before they are asked.
    – Dan Bron
    Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 5:04
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    @DanBron Certainly we can start that conversation. There may be a couple other "easy" things we can do in that regard, but I feel that some totally different sort of approach may be the best long-term strategy.
    – tchrist Mod
    Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 5:12

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