Keith, you're forgetting the Vice Chairs in this process - we're the penultimate layer of vetting, so that any errors or omissions hopefully get corrected before the maps are sent on to the registrar (also, it's state certifiers, rather than regstrars, just to avoid any confusion in titles & terminology). The national registrar's job is busy enough w/o having to make corrections before the already daunting job of scanning and filing is done.
That said, electronic versions of the maps/certs, if provided in the correct format, should be acceptable - several measurers submit theirs to me that way, and I produce my own maps in electronic format myself.