If you want to delete all the drafts in your system you can modify de script update/common/scripts/updatemultilingual.php in 3.8.x distribution. The first thing the script does is delete all the drafts, take that part into a new file. It will delete all the drafts in your system.
The script makes a list of the current drafts so there should not be people publishing when the script is counting drafts.
It will be also a good idea to add a few sleep seconds between each iteration, if not the system will be really heavy loaded. Remember doing a database backup before.
But this is not quite the point - being able to delete ALL drafts.
The question is to get access as an administrator to e.g. drafts made by persons long gone. Sometimes these drafts can just be deleted sometimes they should actually be used. But I do not want to delete ALL drafts.
I have a similar problem with trash. It often happens that one user by mistake deletes an object made by someone else who is no longer employed. As an administrator I should be able to pull that object from trash, but this is not possible. Helle
I once made a script to delete drafts, you can find it at http://pubsvn.ez.no/community/trunk/hacks/untoucheddrafts/bin/php/remove_drafts.php . It has a preview mode (dry run) in which you can see a list of users and the count of their drafts (by default sorted on draft count).
