eli5: why do official documents always require us to write in block letters?

Question

eli5: why do official documents always require us to write in block letters?

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Answer 1

Cursive is harder to read, even with good handwriting, and most people have bad handwriting. Even if it only slows the reader down by 10%, and increases error by 5% that is a lot of slow down and errors when dealing with hundreds of thousand if not millions of people.

Answer 2

These documents are normally read by a machine using OCR (optical character recognition). Using all caps makes the system way less prone to errors