What do I do with preparation nominations?

At the start of every new Powerplay cycle, I am given a handful of preparation nominations to use. What are these for? What should I be nominating?

Solution 1:

As the name implies, they're nomination votes that help rank the top-ten systems in the Preparation list. Essentially this works out to them being effort-free way of completing a preparation activity, and allows for a sort of bootstraping of the nomination system order in each new cycle.

To use your votes, you select a system in the Preparation list in the Power overview, and then use the Pledge to Nominate button.

This will bring up a dialog which allows you to select how many nomination votes to use:

Each vote causes the current preparation value of the system to increase by one without you having to actually complete the normal preparation task.