I'll be frank, the voting mechanisms are a big cause of trouble. They encourage trying to game the system to maximize "stats" to try all kinds of complicated schemes to move the abstract numbers at the expense of a coherent narrative. AN has been good about trying to keep some coherence, though in part that is through keeping implications and problems in the background unless they are actively necessary to address by the King. You're missing out on a lot of how Ymaryn society works, which is a bit of a shame because seeing the broader perspective and day-to-day life in an imagined community of this complexity would be quite appealing. I've encouraged him to do more stories to provide that perspective to you all, and to change the voting to be purely narrative with all the numbers (if he has to keep them) moved behind the scenes to remove the illusion that you're omniscient and can puppeteer society at a whim.
That said I also think voter ambitions are a problem, including the way Ymaryn has been min-maxed to promote technological advancement at basically all cost. Multiple times the core Ymaryn society has escaped total collapse through sheer luck, and frankly through the mercy of AN. You ought to consider simpler and more durable institutions and "survival values," look to ways to reinforce social stability at the bedrock level; the whole "question everything" ethos is a time bomb under Ymaryn society that is going to go off sooner or later. In part that's due to the basically irreconcilable tension between meritocracy and collectivism, though the way so much of Ymaryn agricultural practices are tied in completely to a religion that has been set up to destroy itself over time is another major issue. If you think SCIENCE! is going to replace the Ymaryn cult, you've got another think coming...
Also since I'm in a loquacious mood, maybe also consider the broader picture. You're all aghast at the idea of Ymaryn Alexander the Great launching a spree of conquest across the Known World. But consider the role of the Hellenistic culture the real Alexander created and spread all over the Near East. You're not going to make a pacifist run, and war is not something you will ever get rid of. The spread of Ymaryn culture across the globe, and the forced interaction of Ymaryns with other peoples, especially under a leader as keenly interested in culture as not-Alexander, could produce an incredible flowering of art, economics, science, literature, and every other field of human life. And frankly you lost any claim to being "hippy forest elves" a long time ago, and have (oh so innocently) aggregated the largest empire in the known world already. You can guess at the costs of spreading out in a wave like the Greeks, and lament the lives lost; but is that worth forgoing the chance to to write a bold new narrative on the pages of history? Is it worth forgoing the opportunity to spread the best of Ymaryn ideas to other cultures, who can make them their own and synthesize them with ideas the Ymaryn would never have alone?
