a platform to connect voters with available notaries
The Founding of MOtary Connections
Ballot notarization is a term that’s come up more frequently in 2020 compared to any other year. For those not familiar with it, notarization is required in most states for anyone who plans to submit an absentee or mail-in ballot, the purpose being to make sure that the ballot is legitimate. It seems like a lot of steps: first, you need to apply or state reasons why you need a mail-in or absentee ballot, then find and contact a notary, and finally get the ballot to be notarized. But in light of these challenges, a team of seniors - Jonah Zacks, Jack Morris, Lucas McCarty, and Sydney Pollock - came together to form an organization to make the process easier for Missouri voters.
MOtary Connections is a platform to connect voters with available notaries. Through the website, you can register as a notary, or provide your email address and zip code to be paired with a nearby notary. On what inspired the group to form the organization, Jonah says his personal goal was to reach out to voters of Missouri and provide them an accessible way to cast their votes during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, the website was designed to make the voting process as easy as possible. Lucas, who was heavily involved in programming the infrastructure of motaryconnections.org, describes some of the challenges he faced in creating the site: “There are other factors I had to take into consideration. For example, what does the system do if it cannot process certain information? If a new notary signs up to join the service, how do we verify them? How does the system communicate with the team? I had to take all these questions into account when developing MOtary’s technology. I even built a sort of server to keep the MOtary connections service running continuously. The whole process took well over 100 hours of work, but I would say that the outcome was well worth it.” As a result of the group’s hard work, they even got to be featured on Fox 2 News prior to the election (check out the segment on this page)!
So what’s next for MOtary Connections? The team is looking to continue and expand the platform to encompass other processes that require notarization. Jonah shares, “The US has a lot of supply chain problems. That’s all this notary business really is. We have people all over the country willing to provide a service and people who need it, so hopefully, we can do a bit of good there.” Jack adds, “Soybeans! The Midwest has an incredible surplus of soybean production, but grocery stores are often low in supply. This issue appears to be one of communication rather than production, and we think we may be able to solve it with the service we have created.” Great job to Jonah, Lucas, Jack, and Sydney for their remarkable act of service to our Missouri community, and we are so excited to see what they will continue to accomplish with their platform!
Post Author: Community Service Committee Rep Aishani Chakraborty
留言