No, right now, EVERYONE can vote. 90% of people have no idea what to vote for. The vote is useless. It needs to go.
With the new system, only the ones who are willing to put in the time and effort necessary get to vote. They are already the ones who know what to do. They were already the ones deciding the movement of the power. Only now, it will be explicit.
Even better, it will be simple. There will be a list of the top 10 players. You get into that list, you can vote on which system(s) to prepare. Simple, easy.
FAR easier than a bizarre system of weighting. Most players ALREADY don't understand how the heck system value works. Just look at the systems that get prepared and you'll have an excellent idea of how true that is. Adding weighting will only make that even harder for the average player to figure out, and when you've got a system that's already at risk of collapse because barely anyone participates, that's a huge problem. One you can't afford to exacerbate.
Because of this exact problem, having the top 10 choose the selected systems, and issuing missions to that system(As outlined in my suggestion) would be infinitely simpler and more comprehensible to the average player than anything else.
Right now, a player wants to join a power. They join, and go to the central system. They grab 50 merits, and go to the map, and stare in utmost confusion at all the green and red and orange dots that make no sense. They haul them to one of them, and...nothing happens. Yaaaay. A week later, their effort is swept away, because they didn't support the right system, because they didn't want to read a 25 page excel sheet on optimum preparation guidelines. They quit, because this is boring.
With the new system, they join the power and go to the central system. There, they take a mission, which directs them directly to a system that was targeted by one of the top 10. They go there and attack a base, or haul in some needed commodities, or haul a spy. They're rewarded with credits and merits, and a shortly later, they watch as the system THEY helped prepare, now goes into the next stage. Again, they're back to that same system, helping with missions, and this time, their power TAKES the system!
THEY did that. Simply. Easily. Straightforwardly. They stay in the power, and start working towards taking the next system.
And 5C will be in that top 10- voting for the worst systems possible, meaning people have to spend huge amounts of time and money. You can create extra accounts on consoles, multibox etc and they'll do it. 5C will stack your prep, expand for you and fortify everything just so you can't turmoil out of it, because of lack of weighting- so linking decisions to effort won't work because it greenlights 5C actions and that credits are so easy to farm.
Weighting ensures 5C have to work exponentially harder to do what they do. 10 prep spent in a good system is worth 0.1 in a bad one.