Augmented Democracy as a Coherence-Constrained Control System: Governance Infrastructure Under Adversarial Conditions

Version 2 (24 September 2026) corrects version 1 (18 December 2025) on five points. The procedural core of the framework (procedural rather than semantic authority, admissible artifacts defined by provenance, the engagement gate, bounded influence, rollback without state corruption) is unchanged. 1. The coherence gate is re-scoped. Version 1 defined γ as a normalized variance of entropy values attached to votes and claimed that a low γ detects Sybil identities, bribery and coordinated voting. The entropy is drawn by the protocol, not by the voter, so its variance is a statistic of the randomness source: it detects a stuck, replayed or manipulated source and says nothing about who voted or why. The corresponding theorems in the appendix are downgraded to conjectures with the reason stated. Detection of coordination from process statistics is stated as an open problem. 2. Implementation status is corrected. Version 1 described a production deployment. There is none. A reference application (v0.2) implements the engagement gate only; the QuantumHarmony test network carries no pallet implementing the mechanisms of this paper; the Rust in the appendix is a design sketch, and one listing has a defect recorded in place. 3. Dependencies on the author's earlier work (ERLHS, Karmonic Mesh, Proof of Coherence) are removed, together with the closing "complete architecture" claim. The scoring mechanism of Proof of Coherence v1 was withdrawn in July 2026 and the related coherence research line was discontinued after null results. Nothing in this paper depends on it. 4. "Quantum entropy" is replaced by "verifiable randomness source". A quantum device is one option and is not supplied in any deployment to date. 5. Wording: "immutable" is replaced by "content addressed" and "tamper evident"; "NFT" by "credential"; bonds are denominated in nontransferable reputation or a refundable deposit. No deployment of this framework issues or sells a token. This work makes no claims of deployment, productization, or political adoption. The contribution is systems-theoretic: governance can be modeled as a control system with formal invariants, rollback semantics, and failure detection on its own inputs, and democratic legitimacy can be treated as a measurable property of process quality independent of specific outcomes. Files: paper-core.pdf (main paper, v2), paper-appendix.pdf (technical appendices, v2, first deposit).