Norm Sloan ducks out of the rain just before 10:30 AM on a quiet Saturday and stakes out a dry spot at the entrance to the Century Shopping Centre. His arms are full of the tools for the day’s work: signs from County Clerk David Orr’s office, a folding table, a metal folding chair, a big rainbow-colored umbrella, and a backpack and a Treasure Island bag filled with pens, forms, clipboards, and personal belongings. He uses public transportation to haul this awkward load from his home in Wrigleyville to different sites around the city.
“Some registrars do two or three hours a week or two or three hours a month,” says Sloan. When he’s not rattling off instructions to potential voters, he speaks softly, in careful, measured sentences. “It just depends upon what priorities people have. I have maintained a tunnel vision on this. It’s been easier for me because I don’t have family commitments or other professional commitments.”
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Two volunteers from another organization arrive soon after Sloan does. They set up a table on the north side of the mall entrance and begin soliciting pedestrians. Sloan favors a low-key approach. “I don’t yell out to people,” he explains. “The table says what I’m doing here. I don’t need to add to the noise pollution in the area. They see what I’m doing, and they either need the services or they don’t.”
Sloan traces his own political awakening to seeing a film about the United Farm Workers at his Jesuit high school in Massachusetts in 1967. Soon after, he was standing outside grocery stores encouraging consumers to support the grape boycott. He moved to Chicago in 1984, then decided to become a registrar in 1987, during Ron Sable’s race for alderman of the 44th Ward and Mayor Harold Washington’s reelection run. He continued to register voters in 1988 spurred on by the city’s proposed human rights ordinance and the presidential election. The toll of AIDS on the gay community also motivated him to devote more time to registration as part of Voter Impact’s campaign, which has registered more than 35,000 voters since 1988.
By noon the other voter registrars at the mall have folded up their table and chairs, loaded it all into a hatchback they’ve pulled up to the curb, and called it a day.
An exuberant young woman in Lycra shorts and a white T-shirt parks her Honda Civic in the bus stop in front of the Great Ace, then bounds across rain-slicked Clark Street to Sloan’s table and demands to be registered. Sloan complies. “I can vote! I can vote!” she hollers. “Hooooooo!” She runs back across Clark pumping her arms over her head, leaps into her car, slams the door, and screams again like a crazed cheerleader as she drives off: “Hoooooo!”
