[cynwoody]

Just last week, Hawaii was claiming the originals were destroyed in a fire.

I missed the part about the fire. Do you have a link?

The reports I saw implied the documents were deliberately discarded (perhaps after being scanned, however?).

However, according to World Net Daily:

"I am not aware of any birth certificate records that have been destroyed by the department," Janice Okubo, public information officer for the Hawaii DOH, told WND. "When the department went electronic in 2001, vital records, whether in paper form or any other form, [were] maintained. We don't destroy records."

Okubo affirmed that beginning in 2001, all vital records, including birth records, moved to electronic formats.

"Any records that we had in paper or any other form before 2001 are still in file within the department," she insisted. "We have not destroyed any vital statistics records that we have."

[rcrngroup]

Sorry... meant to say the records were deliberately destroyed as claimed by Hawaii, and now the claim has been reversed by Dr Janice Okubo.

[El Gato]

Okubo affirmed that beginning in 2001, all vital records, including birth records, moved to electronic formats.

Then why bother with a Certification. It takes no more effort to print a copy of the original, if that's on file electronically, than to print an abstract, since in either case an original physical document need not be located, retrieive, copied and returned to the file.