Tim Thomas Has Not Voted Since 2004

After last week's Tim Thomas brouhaha, in which the Bruins' goalie skipped his team's White House visit and explained the thing via nuttily capitalized Facebook message, which made the Bruins mad at him, we figured we would examine just how much Tim Thomas exercised his own rights as a free citizen. The results don't speak too highly of the young man's civic virtue.

Thomas, a Flint, Mich., native, first voted in his home state in 1997, when he was a senior in college, per public voter registration records available on Nexis. He then voted next in 2000—he had spent some of the interim years in Europe—and again in a 2001 special election. (Presumably he secured an absentee ballot while he was playing that year in the Swedish Elite League.)

Thomas didn't vote again until 2004—because of the NHL lockout, he was again playing in Europe, this time in Helsinki. And that's the last vote on record for Timothy James Thomas, Jr.

Other Tim Thomases have voted in Michigan since then, but not him. And there's no record of him registering in Massachusetts, where he makes his home now (he's lived in Lynnfield, Danvers, and Middleton), or in Rhode Island, where he lived before setting up shop in Massachusetts.

So, what have we learned? Someone—a landed white male, to boot—is acting "in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government." Huh. Weird how that works.