If you buy a house in Chicago and want to register the deed, the Cook County Recorder of Deeds will accept two kinds of submissions: paper records and scanned images of paper records. No matter which option you choose, the clerks will manually type the information into the county database.
Roughly once a week, someone — for example, an addict claiming a home that actually belongs to a grandparent with dementia — will mail in a fake document, and “if they formatted it correctly, we have to record it,” said John Mirkovic, the deputy recorder. “It’s one of the main reasons we’re so interested in blockchain.”
