Governed Candidate Standing: A Transition Architecture for the Legitimate Constitution of Object-Relative Evidentiary Fields

A preserved historical record can remain valid, semantically unchanged, and provenance-intact while the later process that determines which parts of that record are allowed to participate in an object-relative inquiry becomes selective, outcome-conditioned, capacity-distorted, retrieval-biased, adaptively contaminated, or otherwise improperly governed. Existing work addresses many neighboring problems: selective inclusion and outcome reporting, evidentiary admissibility and relevance, protocol specification, provenance, retrieval transparency, adaptive data analysis, and post-selection inference. Yet these mechanisms do not by themselves supply a single transition architecture for the warrant by which preserved historical material acquires candidate standing in a later inquiry. This paper formalizes that transition. It distinguishes a versioned declared inquiry universe, a valid pre-formation receipt pool, candidate-unit construction, candidate eligibility, capacity-constrained selection, downstream formative-linkage adjudication, and the integrity status of the candidate-constitution process itself. Candidate units may be single receipts, sets, ordered sequences, or configurations; construction and eligibility require independent justification; object-relative eligibility is separated from outcome-conditioned admission; unresolved eligibility is propagated through robustness over admissible resolutions; and retrieval, derived artifacts, effective information state, and adaptive system state are treated as governance-relevant when they materially alter the field presented to adjudication. The architecture also separates traceability from legitimacy and represents the final result on two independent axes: the downstream linkage result and Candidate-Constitution Integrity (CCI). The central theorem is a non-inheritance result: historical fidelity does not entail candidate-constitution integrity. Every original receipt may remain valid while the later evidentiary field is improperly constituted. Conversely, a correct downstream outcome does not retroactively validate a defective candidate-constitution process. The contribution is therefore not a new theory of selection bias. It is a formal account of candidate standing as a distinct governed transition between preserved history and later object-relative evidentiary use.