04 — Existing approval channel decision

Decision

NO EXISTING LAWFUL APPROVAL CHANNEL EXISTS

for a real president / ai_council seat to cast an apr_approvals vote in an identity-bound, proposer-excluding, audited, non-manual way.

Why (synthesis of files 02 + 03)

requirement for a lawful channel	met by any existing path?
records a human-president vote into apr_approvals	NO — no tool/function/route does this
records an ai_council vote into apr_approvals	NO — same
binds/authenticates the real approver identity (not free text)	NO — approver is an unverified string; no per-seat credential
structurally prevents self-approval (proposer)	NO — guard reads source_context.proposer (NULL here); not enforced at insert
avoids manual SQL / manual Directus	NO — the only insert path is a raw manual write
writes an audit of how/by whom the row was made	NO — table has no channel/auth/provenance column

• The DOT lifecycle is propose → [GAP] → execute; the approve step has no DOT/CLI.
• All DB functions touching apr_approvals are read-only consumers of votes.
• apr_approvals Directus collection has 0 fields ⇒ no managed API binding.
• Auto-approve is disabled (2026-06-06); the two "approval"-named flows are unrelated (ai_discussions / log-only).
• The 42 historical rows were a bootstrap batch back-fill, not a repeatable channel.

Consequence

• The APR_APPROVAL_CHANNEL_IDENTIFIED_FOR_REAL_APPROVERS success state is NOT reachable.
• The APR_0415_QUORUM_READY_FOR_EXECUTION state is NOT reachable (0 legitimate votes; quorum_passed=false).
• Proceed to the fallback: design the smallest missing primitive dot-apr-approve (file 05), staged only.

What is explicitly NOT being done (because no lawful channel exists)

• No vote recorded by the agent as president or council → would be fabrication.
• No operator root / SYNC_SECRET / GCP-owner vote → capability ≠ authority; owner prompt text ≠ a recorded quorum vote.
• No manual SQL / Directus insert into apr_approvals → forbidden bypass.