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sketerpot comments on Research methods - Less Wrong
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Assuming that there are some legal requirements that the records be stored securely, you could back them up digitally with Tarsnap for $0.30 per GB transfer, and $0.30 per GB per month of storage. If you loosen your security requirements and go with Amazon EBS, you can do it for exactly a third of that. I expect competitors to offer similar pricing, but those are the ones that I'm familiar with. Both of these are fairly low-level options, and would require someone who knows what they're doing to set up. Of course, printing everything out and storing it also takes a lot of effort, but it's an ongoing effort that everyone takes for granted, whereas getting electronic backup set up would be something new, and therefore painful.
It is also a new decision that someone would have to take responsibility for making, who would be blamed if something went wrong. No one has to stick their neck out to continue the old way.
In 1993 I worked at the Australian Electoral Commission for a while. They had a similar requirement pertaining to paper, particularly the forms people fill in to enrol or re-enrol at their current address. (Showing up to vote is compulsory, so the AEC makes it really easy to enrol. There's even a "walks" team that just goes door to door getting people to fill in their enrolment form.) They scanned every paper form to magneto-optical cartridges (the most compact replaceable storage technology at the time) and kept the paper filed in boxes, never to be touched. Maybe once a week a paper form would need to be fished out of filing because it had escaped scanning.
That is: this was a completely solved problem twenty years ago.