SAFE-Matter™ Minimum Constitutional Legitimacy Threshold: The Non-Negotiable Evidential Boundary for Execution Authority in Consequence-Bearing Systems

This paper establishes the SAFE-Matter™ Minimum Constitutional Legitimacy Threshold as the non-negotiable evidential boundary beneath which execution authority cannot constitutionally persist within consequence-bearing systems. The paper defines legitimacy as a continuously maintained constitutional condition rather than a historic or inherited status, and formalises the principle that operational authority must terminate once evidential sufficiency falls below a deterministically governed admissibility floor. The framework addresses one of the primary structural causes of governance collapse in safety-critical environments: gradual permissibility erosion through tolerated ambiguity, operational optimism, threshold softening, continuity pressure, and evidential compromise. The paper argues that most governance failures do not emerge from immediate catastrophic breakdown, but from progressive degradation of evidential discipline over time. SAFE-Matter™ establishes that execution legitimacy cannot exist partially, probabilistically, or conditionally beneath the minimum constitutional threshold. Where admissible proof becomes insufficient, stale, fragmented, contradictory, unverifiable, or constitutionally indeterminate, operational authority must cease irrespective of convenience, continuity pressure, institutional expectation, or assumed functionality. The paper further positions the Minimum Constitutional Legitimacy Threshold as a foundational boundary layer beneath UNKNOWN-state governance, constitutional recovery doctrine, legitimacy debt accumulation, runtime admissibility governance, and deterministic execution control. The framework rejects assumption-based continuation and establishes that consequence-bearing systems must continuously maintain sufficient present-state evidential legitimacy in order to retain constitutional authority to operate.