Democrat John Lehman has officially unseated Republican Sen. Van Wanggaard (R-Racine) in the 21st District recall election that will determine the makeup of Wisconsin's state Senate.

The Racine County Board of Canvassers met Tuesday morning to certify the results of the June 5 election and found that not only did Lehman win, but he also increased his margin of victory by 55 votes.

Wanggaard has yet to concede and campaign officials say they have received allegations of voter fraud voting irregularities. However, County Clerk Wendy Christensen told FOX 6 News that she was not aware of any problems at the polling places on election day.

Mike Haas, general counsel for the state Government Accountability Board, said the agency has received some phone calls, emails, and copies of blog posts alleging fraud but nothing formal

http://www.alternet.org/story/155747/what_does_it_say_about_america_that_we_jail_teens_for_having_sex_or_being_late_to_school_/

Last week, the country was riveted by the story of young Diane Tran, a high school junior age 17, who was tossed in jail for a night because she was missing too much school.

The reason her case attracted so much attention? Tran missed those days of school--or arrived late--due to exhaustion. She worked two jobs to help support her siblings. Her parents had split and moved out of town. She became, in essence, a poster-girl for both the recession and for the criminalization of youth. Even those local newscasters expected to be dispassionate were moved to say their "hearts went out" to this girl.

Command Central Makes Its Move—A Shady Deal With WI County Clerks

Last September, Election Integrity investigators discovered that unbeknownst to average citizens of Wisconsin, Command Central sent those 46 districts an offer: trade out your old Optech Insight Scanner for two DRE Touch Screen models, at no charge. The Optech machine is the one that paper ballots are fed through to read and register the votes.

While these machines are also susceptible to hacking (see Rep. Pridemore explain how to game the machine) in the case of a recount, it is possible to physically monitor the paper ballots as they are fed through the machine to see if they match the machine totals.

With DRE Touch Screens, however, one’s vote could be flipped and one would never know because there is no receipt or paper trail voters receive to confirm their vote was counted as voted. All that is left is a paper tape that shows votes and vote totals. If the machine is hacked, those totals have no other verifiable trail to confirm the results.

According to the Convergence Consulting report, “The Battle for the North American Couch Potato: Bundling, TV, Internet,Telephone, Wireless,” 2.65 million American multichannel subscribers cut their cords between 2008-2011 and switched to over-the-top (OTT) services like Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) to get their video programming. The report says that only 112,000 cable, satellite and telco TV service subscriptions were added in the U.S. last year — less than a third of the 380,000 added subscriptions that Leichtman Research Group reported last month while auditing only the top multi-channel programming services.

http://paidcontent.org/2012/04/03/419-researcher-over-1-million-u-s-cable-subscribers-cut-cord-in-2011/

A study conducted by USC's Annenberg School for Communication and the University of Wisconsin-Madison analyzed newscasts of 122 local TV stations in the nation's largest media markets during the 2002 mid-term elections. They found that the majority of the newscasts at these stations did not contain a single campaign story.

...

It is assumed -- generally by newscast consultants hired by the stations -- that election news does not help ratings. Even so, political advertising is a major source of revenue for the stations.

http://www.cybercollege.org/tvnews.htm