An assistant principal and her daughter have been arrested and charged with illegally accessing students’ computer accounts at a Florida high school to rig the vote for homecoming queen, officials said.
Laura Rose Carroll, 50, who is an assistant principal at an elementary school, and her 17-year-old-daughter have been charged with a variety of offenses, including conspiracy, unlawful use of a two-way communication device and criminal use of personally identified information, said a statement from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Carroll’s daughter was crowned homecoming queen at Pensacola’s Tate High School last year before the fraud was discovered, officials said.
Hundreds of votes were later tagged as fraudulent after an investigation. Some 117 votes alone came from the same IP address linked to Carroll’s phone, investigators discovered.
Several students reported that Carroll’s daughter talked about using her mother’s school computer account to access student files in order to cast votes that appeared to be from them, according to officials.
Carroll was booked into the Escambia County Jail on Monday, and her bond was set at $8,500. Her daughter was taken to the Escambia Regional Juvenile Detention Center.