I'm a level 47 Paladin with the power to cast blessings. If this does not answer your question then please explain what you are talking about.
There are different levels of DMOZ editors with authority that goes from an individual category to all categories. Editors can add, approve, remove, reject, modify description (or move submission to another "more relevant" category for further revew.) The majority of submission are rejected or moved - a large percentage are MFA type sytes, affiliate clones, don't add anything new to the existing category, or are submitted to the wrong category (i.e. don't submit to the regular shopping category if your site doesn't sell anything - or sells adult products). It can also be a situation of first come, first listed - i.e. if two real estate sites offering basically the same content are submitted, only the first one will be approved as the second is basically a duplication of content.
Intersting note - especially when there are so many scraped sites out there. I imagine if an editor were to list a plagiarized site (unknowingly) that they happen to find browsing the web, the original site owner could be SOL if they should submit - possibly rejected as a mirror or duplicate content.
It is possible but editors should check the first site submitted to try and establish if it is the original. If not they should reject and list the original instead. Thus the original site may get listed without ever being submitted.
The scenario I imagined was one where an editor found/listed a plagiarized site while browsing and saw/reviewed the submission of the legit site at a much later date. It might appear that the legit site was the dup. Isn't also possible that another editor could review the original submission after the copied site was listed?
It's possible but what usually happens is that the editor realizes that the original site is the main site to list when investigating it as a mirror or affiliate. The editor then lists the legit site and deletes the "plagiarized" site.
That's why it is important for new editors to gain experience before being approved for larger, more spammy categories.
Much depends on the categories the editor is given. For example, an editor that can freely add 100s of pages all pointing to pages that are part of a network of adult sites can make some major cash as a result of the listings. Recently here on DP, there has been a lot of criticism and examination of more extreme adult content on DMOZ, especially child porn, and some progress has been made in helping stop this practice. There is a lot of money to be made in the adult industry, and people that gain editor roles on DMOZ stand to make decisions that help certain sites profit as a result of their decisions. Those sites may even be owned by the editors themselves. The same may apply to editors in other categories, but there is much more attention to things like child porn and extreme adult content, since it is much more controversial in nature.
You'd be surprised how many of the sites would be impossible to replicate successfully. Either you're a realtor, builder, car sales yard in town ABC or you're not. There's alot more to the web than porn and ripped off articles.
To put it in context, Adult branch contains less than 1% of all DMOZ listings. The image galleries are half of those, i.e. approx 0.5% of all DMOZ listings. The extreme ones a tiny fraction of that. In other words when it comes to extreme sexual content, including forms that are legal and involve consenting adults, 99.99995% of DMOZ is clear of such sites.
So what? are you advocating that little corruption, combined with listing of illegal and questionable sites is good and we shouldn't care?
Getting this thread back on topic (I received an infraction for thread hijacking btw), the question was about the powers of a DMOZ editor. The power is directly related to the number and importance of the categories they can edit. Google uses DMOZ in their directory search results, meaning an editor has the power to control a part of the content that appears on parts of google.com.