Ministry of Justice plan to destroy historical wills is ‘insane’, say experts
www.theguardian.com
Department hopes to save £4.5m a year by digitising – then binning – about 100m wills that date back 150 years

UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals “insane” say experts::Department hopes to save £4.5m a year by digitising – then binning – about 100m wills that date back 150 years

    • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      For archival, I think things are less controversial. No one is going to modify a will executed 100 years ago and the world will say “goly gee, we missed that, we will now take from the proper heirs and give to you”.

      For one, it’s a closed matter even if they legitimately failed to execute on the old will.

      For another, if it somehow did matter, they’d probably validate the authenticity of the digital copy at least against some air gapped signature, if not going to restore the actual document from offline.

      For the voting example, I think people think too highly of the paper system. Corrupt voting infrastructure can have stuffed ballots ready to go and enough non voting registered voters to back up their ballots beyond the reasonable extent an audit would ever go. Paper votes have often been corrupted. Most we ever do is recount, and if the ballots were stuffed, this would do nothing.