Laura Rose Carroll Pensacola school assistant principal and teen daughter, Emily Rose Grover, busted rigging Tate High School homecoming queen vote.
Florida prosecutors on Monday accused a Pensacola school assistant principal and her 17 year old daughter of conspiring to rig a homecoming queen election.
Laura Rose Carroll, 50, an assistant principal at Bellview Elementary School along with her daughter, a student at Tate High School, allegedly accessed student FOCUS accounts and cast hundreds of fraudulent ballots in the school’s 2020 Homecoming Court vote last fall.
Emily Rose Grover, 17, won the vote and was named homecoming queen FOX10 reports.
Agents began looking into the matter in October, when hundreds of votes for the school’s homecoming court were flagged as fraudulent, with 117 of them originating from the same IP address.
Investigators said several students reported the daughter admitting using her mother’s FOCUS account access to cast ‘fraudulent’ votes. They also said they found that Carroll’s account accessed hundreds of high school records for Tate High School students since August 2019.
246 fraud votes
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 according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE).
Carroll and her daughter upon their arrests on Monday were both charged with offenses against users of computers, computer systems, computer networks, and electronic devices (a 3rd-degree felony), unlawful use of a two-way communications device (a 3rd-degree felony), criminal use of personally identifiable information (a 3rd-degree felony) and conspiracy to commit these offenses (a 1st-degree misdemeanor.)
District Superintendent Tim Smith told the Pensacola News Journal that Carroll was suspended from her job at Bellview Elementary School. The school district official declined to comment further on the matter.
Grover was expelled from Tate High School, according to the FDLE.
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.
