I could be wildly off-base, but I wonder if some of these systems are airgapped, and the only way the data comes off of the closed system is via printing, to avoid someone inserting a flash drive full of malware in the guise of "copying the CSV file." Obviously there are or should be technical ways to safely extract data in a digital format, but I can see a little value in the provable safety that airgapping gives you.
Sure, but it'd take a literal Act of Congress to force all these states to force all their independent vendors to do a thing, so good luck. And each vendor would probably charge about a million dollars to each state to do the work, in government contracting world. So, probably better to just use AI to OCR them.
