Well the whole not having your bank local to you is not normal for most people. Many banks charge a nominal fee for non clients to notarized a document. I really don’t think the bar of having a paper notarized is too high an expectation. There are many average people who offer notary services from their home and I have seen posts on local Facebook groups and they usually turn up at least 5 in my area.
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Another place that a notary is not uncommon is town/county type offices.
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I’ve found the mailing services (UPS store, Fedex store) have notaries.
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You could also try your local library. Both the head and assistant librarians at our small town library are notaries.
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Auto title places also have notaries.
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I have used an online notary a lot since the pandemic began. Is this allowed by ISEF? Notarize.com. Requires you to have videoing chat capabilities which most smart phones have.
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Sooo… it’s not that hard to find notaries (technically banks and the UPS stores have them), BUT they have lately started to really limit what they will agree to notarize. The biggest pain is if you’re WFH and you need to have an I-9 for employment notarized (it’s the new, cool kid remote workplace way to prove who you are… back in the day you just had to schlep your passport and/or SS card into the office). For some reason, now banks and UPS stores have started to refuse to do them, which is somewhat ridiculous, but I’m guessing that they’re afraid of being sued if they are involved in identify theft/ fraud.
In Quebec they are their own entity, like a reserved practice. It’s difficult enough that I have a stack of documents I need notarized for various reasons that have been sitting on my desk for too long. You have to make an appointment and pay fees for their services.
Well,here stateside, its not hard to find a notary (or become one). But you might heed to set up an appointment and there is a fee. Still, not a huge obstacle to resolving a dispute.
In addition to banks, title insurance companies, law firms, UPS/FedEx Office/Kinkos and similar-- there are stand alone notary businesses. Google the city closest to you and the word “notary” and you’ll probably find options you didn’t know existed.
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These days remote/online notary services are available as well. I’m actually a notary myself but am not registered to do remote notarizations.
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This. We did the entire sales transaction for our house via online notary.
Frankly I think it is stupid that USEF requires your reference letters to be notarized - I get that they want people to jump through the hoops to show they are serious, but it’s a lot of unnecessary effort for the actual references to have to do that.
Love this! Used it to buy a house, you’d think they’d go for it?
But what is the point of requiring the letters to be notarized? If they are USEF members making these claims in writing under their signature and with their own reputations on the line, what does the notary add to the process? I get that it’s not that hard for everyone to access a notary, but it still seems like a needless obstacle in this process.
So you (general) can not pen a letter using other people’s ID and send it in saying that other person says you are acting as an amateur.
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Notarizing the document is the evidence that the document was not forged by someone else but was actually signed by the person whose signature appears on the document.
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Is that a real concern? I would think if you were trying to get your amateur status back, you would not want to do so fraudulently.
Have you not seen what this thread is about or any of the other threads about people breaking the ammy rules to show in the ammy classes? Why would you think that someone would not fake documents to get their ammy status back, if they are willing to break other rules to show in the division?
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Forging documents is a whole other level of fraud, in my opinion.
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Cheating is cheating…
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