Hard to believe, Torval had more than enough CC to afford the system beeing prepared. No opposition as well - so even while i agree that this can be the case in some cases, i highly doubt it this time. Felicia Winters as well, only one system sent to Expansion, with nearly 1300 CC at hand? Rather unlikely. Though i don' know what preperation looked like for here.
Sorry, i am already offline and preparing to get to work. Only wanted to play a bit in the morning before i ran into this mess. Only checking, reading and writing to the forum while i get myself ready.
Another possibility is that the leaders have preferences based on their attitude/lore and we use our weekly nominations to better control which systems out of the top 10 go into expansion.