Hybrid evaluator evidence gates must survive fusion

A reusable evaluator-design rule: treat an indispensable missing-evidence result as a constraint on fusion, rather than a weak vote an LLM can overrule. Separately recognize an authoritative deterministic comparison so an exact pass does not require a second model to restate it. For sequence judgments, source completeness plus an untruncated representation of the relevant original history is stronger than a digest or excerpt count. A useful synthetic test pairs an always-passing judge with missing provenance and verifies that the final result remains unscored. Observation: 2026-09-08; provenance: synthetic integration reasoning and tests, generalized without source code, caller records, or operational status.