Our town clerk doesn't care about signatures; it can be recorded. Suppose the document gets challenged in court, and the original has been lost. So the person who want's the document to believed has the town clerk issue a certified copy, and tries to introduce that in court. I don't know if the judge would admit it as evidence.
One problem is that looking at the copy in the town clerk's office that has a signature, it's always going to be a photocopy. There's no way to tell if the "original" document presented to the town clerk had a wet-ink signature or a photocopy signature.
If it were admitted as evidence in a trial, the two sides could argue about whether it's valid or not.
I watched some committees of the VT legislature debate the recent changes to our notary and land records laws. There was a discussion about whether a document needed an original signature to be recorded; that is, would a document with only photocopies of signatures be recorded? Nobody was sure; people seemed to think different town clerks had different policies. |
