They’re the queens of scheme.
A Florida teen bent on winning the homecoming crown didn’t waste time with silly speeches and pep rallies — instead conspiring with her vice principal mom to rig the whole thing through old-fashioned hacking, authorities said.
Laura Rose Carroll, 50, and Emily Rose Grover, 17 — who have both been arrested for the election fraud — cast nearly 250 bogus votes for the teen by breaching online student accounts and pulling the virtual levers, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
The high school drama was first exposed about a month after the October election, when school officials discovered the accounts had been hacked and contacted authorities. Investigators soon found that 117 votes originated from the same IP address.
Carroll, an assistant principal at Bellview Elementary School, and her daughter had allegedly accessed the FOCUS accounts of several students. FOCUS is the Escambia County School District’s student information system.
Evidence showed that a total of 246 votes had been cast from accounts accessed by computers inside the mom and daughter’s Pensacola home or from Carroll’s cellphone, the FDLE said.
Multiple students also told investigators that Carroll’s daughter had boasted about using her mother’s FOCUS account to cast votes.
The mom and daughter were each hit with several charges including unlawful use of a two-way communications device and criminal use of personally identifiable information.
District Superintendent Tim Smith told the Pensacola News Journal that Carroll has been suspended from her job but declined to comment further. Her daughter was expelled from her high school.
Carroll was being held in the Escambia County Jail on $8,500 bond. Her daughter was in custody at the Escambia Regional Juvenile Detention Center.
It was unclear whether they had an attorney who could comment.