Actually, a cyberspace instrument could be made far more secure than a physical piece of paper with a rubber stamp and a raised seal, not to mention a scan of the same converted to a PDF.
Birth certificate registrars should scan all their documents at high resolution and put them on an HTTPS web server. Then, if someone needs their birth certificate to get a passport or get on a presidential ballot, they could ask the registrar to create a URL to their BC. This they could give to the State department or post on whitehouse.gov. Because of HTTPS, anyone viewing the BC via the URL would be assured the document they are examining on their monitor is really what's on file with the registrar.
HTTPS eliminates the man in the middle
. In this case, the man in the middle is Obama and his minions, who had the opportunity to do who knows what to the document between the time it left Hawaii and the time the WH showed it off to the world.
In terms of the forensic security (as opposed to the physical security) of a document, you could not be more mistaken. In the case of Obama, his documents are held by the federal government, or the government of Hawaii, which are now under the full control of Obama (president) and Abercrombie (governor) and their underlings. The former being the person suspected of document fraud and the later being an admitted long time family friend of Obama and his family, the physical security advantage of digital records would certainly have already been compromised. HTTPS internet security offers no protection from insiders at the location these digital documents are stored.
Since it therefore can only be the forensic security of those documents that we can look to, the question becomes: Which type of document, physical or digital, is most dificult to alter without leaving evidence of alteration?
A physical document - of 3 dimensions, infinite detail and bearing all the properties of the paper, the inks, the glues, and the fingerprints of the devices that manufactured and applied them - can always be made forensically more secure than a digital document - representing a 2 dimensional image defined in finite detail (no mater how high the resolution) by nothing but a series of 0s and 1s.
With enough time and care, any digital image can be altered without leaving any trace of that alteration. Attempts to imbed security data or metadata in some image file formats are subject to the same digital hacking alterations as the image itself.
Given enough resources - the tools (optical magnification, chemical analysis, spectrometer, etc. ) already reliably used for detecting fraud in objects of art, archeology, etc., and the technicians with the required expertise - no alteration of physical document is undetectable.
Insider forgers at the location documents are stored, who would have evaded the "HTTPS security protection," offered by digital document, would not evade the security of forensic detection offered by physical documents.