Sponsors (5)
Introduced May 1, 2025 by Kevin Cramer · Last progress May 1, 2025
This bill broadly modernizes and standardizes remote and electronic notarizations—making interstate digital transactions faster and more convenient and creating clearer evidentiary rules—while increasing privacy and fraud risks, imposing technology and storage costs, and reducing some avenues for challenging improper notarizations or preserving stricter state controls.
People and businesses across state lines can rely on out-of-state electronic and remote notarizations as valid, speeding interstate real-estate, commercial, and legal transactions.
Remote signers — including seniors, people with disabilities, and rural residents — can complete notarizations via audiovisual technology, saving travel time and increasing access to notarial services.
State and federal officials, courts, and notarial officers gain clearer, uniform rules and evidentiary standards for electronic and remote notarizations, reducing legal uncertainty and litigation over authenticity.
Signers and the public face increased privacy and data-security risks because required audiovisual recordings and additional identity data must be stored and retained.
Individuals, businesses, and courts may face greater fraud risk because conclusive proof and uniform federal/state recognition of remote electronic notarizations can make forged or improperly authorized notarizations harder to challenge.
Low-income, rural, and non-English-speaking communities (including immigrant populations) may have reduced access because remote notarization depends on technology/internet, raises compliance burdens, and may restrict culturally familiar terms like 'notario'.
Based on analysis of 11 sections of legislative text.
Creates national minimum standards for electronic and remote notarizations, requires ID checks and audiovisual recording, and requires States and federal courts to recognize valid notarizations.
Authorizes and sets national minimum rules for electronic and remote notarizations that affect interstate commerce, while preserving state control over notaries. It lets notaries notarize electronic records and remotely located signers if they follow ID-verification steps, attach/secure electronic signatures to records, and create and retain an audiovisual recording of the remote session. Courts and States must recognize notarizations that are valid under the notary’s State law or these federal standards. The law also bars deceptive advertising by notaries (for example, using “notario” to imply immigration help), preserves notary discretion not to use remote or electronic methods, and creates a limited path for States to adopt alternative rules if they meet certain conditions including a 5-year recording-retention rule.