I think three tickets seems to be working quite well. We leave behind remarkably few nominations, and I think the pressure to be at least a little choosy is a good thing for the process.
And if we really wanted every nomination to get into the vote why bother with the second/third process? We'd just add nominations to a voting list. The way it stands now the vote gets limited to books with at least some level of interest by 3 or more members, and I think that's a good thing (even when my nomination gets left behind as a result
...
). And we get to be polite about some nominations we really don't like: "sorry, I ran out of tickets", rather than "I might have 2 tickets left but I'm not going anywhere near that!"
I have done two nominations a couple of times, but I generally agree, Bookpossum, that using too many tickets for nominations rather than second/third puts the onus on others to provide the second/third which is not particularly fair. But I don't think we need a rule change because it doesn't seem to have been a big problem. ETA: but probably a more of a problem as participation falls off.
(P.S. As regards some earlier posts, I'm almost sorry to have referenced the vote count, but because of our rules - which I like - it does provide some rough measure of our participation levels. That was all I meant, it wasn't supposed to restart any discussion over the rule about who can vote.)