Florida Teen and Mom Could Face 16 Years in Prison for Rigging Homecoming Votes

A Florida woman and her teenage daughter could face up to 16 years in prison.

Why?

Because they have been accused of rigging the votes for Homecoming Court.

The daughter was 17 years old when the votes for Homecoming Court were rigged.

However, she recently turned 18 years old, so will officially be tried as an adult.

This means that both the Florida woman and her daughter could face 16 years in prison — each.

Keep in mind that this severe punishment is for rigging Homecoming Court votes.

That’s right: they could both go to jail for over a decade for messing with high school celebrations.

Yet our same justice system seems to be ignoring irregularities and contradictions in the highly scrutinized 2020 presidential election.

More details below:

Future Democratic vote organizer. https://t.co/UlFF2AALyR

— Robert Barnes (@barnes_law) May 7, 2021

I get what they did was wrong and deserves a punishment but 16 years is a bit extreme…

Florida student accused of rigging homecoming queen vote could face 16-year sentence https://t.co/raUWxzOU5N via @Yahoo

— Kathy (@Kathy_Dominguez) May 5, 2021

Florida teen accused of rigging homecoming election to be tried as adult https://t.co/zsalOaqZhS pic.twitter.com/OnLCJCxXxz

— New York Post (@nypost) May 5, 2021

A punishment of 16 years would almost certainly discourage anyone else from attempting to rig the Homecoming Court elections in the future.

So why don’t we apply this to public elections that have actual consequences regarding national policy?

CBS News has more details on this election fraud:

A Florida mother and her teenage daughter each face up to 16 years in prison after rigging a high school homecoming court competition, officials announced on Tuesday. The daughter who, was 17 when the crime took place, recently turned 18 and will be tried as an adult.

50-year-old Laura Rose Carroll, an assistant principal at Bellview Elementary School in Pensacola, Florida, was arrested alongside her daughter, Emily Rose Grover, in March.

The arrests came following an investigation that began in November when the Escambia County School District contacted law enforcement to report unauthorized access into hundreds of student accounts, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in a press release.

In October, 117 votes for Tate High School’s Homecoming Court all originating from the same IP address within a short period of time and were flagged as fraudulent, authorities said.

Investigators found that Carroll — who had district-level access of the school board’s student information system, called FOCUS — and Grover had accessed student accounts.

Evidence showed Carroll’s cell phone and computers associated with their residence had unauthorized access to FOCUS and were used to cast 246 votes for the homecoming court.

Students also reported that Grover said her mom used FOCUS to cast votes.

Carroll had also been using her FOCUS account to access 372 high school students’ records, 339 at Tate High School, since August 2019.

The mother-daughter-duo were arrested and booked at Escambia County Jail on one count each of offenses against users of computers, computer systems, computer networks, and electronic devices, a third-degree felony; unlawful use of a two-way communications device, a third-degree felony; criminal use of personally identifiable information, a third-degree felony; and conspiracy to commit these offenses (a 1st degree misdemeanor).

Carroll’s bond was set at $8,500 and Grover was transferred to the Escambia Regional Juvenile Detention Center.

The state prosecutor announced Tuesday that Grover would be tried as an adult. She turned 18 in April, according to the Associated Press.

Carroll was suspended from her job, although it is unclear if she has been fired, and Grover was expelled from Tate High School.

Notice that the rigging wasn’t caught until after the Homecoming Court election had already been stolen.

Sound familiar?

It may take a while… it may take months or years, but the truth always comes out.

And the people rigging the election typically have connections to someone in power.

HOMECOMING HACKED: A Florida assistant principal and her daughter are accused of rigging a high school homecoming court competition. https://t.co/mpmRyqbDVL pic.twitter.com/1dyfKiDeqc

— 48 Hours (@48hours) May 8, 2021

Florida teen charged as adult in homecoming vote-rigging case along with her mother https://t.co/HHmmOMYj1G pic.twitter.com/cEscV57OA1

— South Florida Sun Sentinel (@SunSentinel) May 4, 2021

This quickly became a national story.

But the sad part is that many of the people outraged at this story, seem to have turned an eye on what happened on November 3, 2020.

There were many irregularities and contradictions that have yet to be accounted for.

The Washington Post reported on a few more details regarding this case:

On the day she was crowned homecoming queen, Emily Grover wore a sparkly silver dress. A bouquet of roses rested in the crook of her arm, and a crown adorned her curled blond hair.

Then the achievement crashed down around her: Prosecutors accused her and her mother, an assistant principal in the same school district, of casting hundreds of illicit votes to rig the election. Grover was expelled from her high school, and her mother, Laura Carroll, was suspended from her job.

Prosecutors have moved to try Grover as an adult, the Florida State Attorney’s Office for Escambia County confirmed. Grover was 17 when she was charged with felonies in March but turned 18 last month.

The case’s transfer to adult court, first reported by NorthEscambia.com, enables a judge to choose whether to impose adult or juvenile sanctions if Grover is found guilty. Florida’s juvenile courts lose jurisdiction over defendants when they turn 19.

“Whatever punishments that could have been imposed [by a juvenile court], there’s a limited period of time that those would have been able to stay in effect,” said Greg Marcille, chief assistant state attorney.

Carroll and Grover, of Cantonment, Fla., about 18 miles north of Pensacola, are charged with offenses against computer users, criminal use of personally identifiable information, unlawful use of a two-way communications device and conspiracy to commit those offenses.

Carroll has pleaded not guilty and has a trial scheduled for August, court records show. Grover’s attorney, Randall Etheridge, who also represents Carroll, said Grover has also pleaded not guilty.

Days after Grover was elected Tate High School’s homecoming queen on Oct. 30, the Escambia County School District contacted law enforcement to report unauthorized access to student accounts, as The Washington Post previously reported. Hundreds of votes had been flagged as suspicious, including 117 that came from the same IP address within a short period.

Carroll, 50, and Grover were soon suspected of involvement. In her role at Bellview Elementary School, Carroll had broad access to the district’s student information software. Election Runner, an application used to count votes, said it had received an ethics complaint alleging that Grover had used her mother’s account to cast fake votes for herself.

School board members confronted Carroll with the allegations. She responded that she had given her daughter access to her student information account in the past, the arrest warrant says.

Grover gave her own version of events the next day. “I have had access to my mothers account,” she allegedly wrote to the school board. “My mother knows nothing about this, she has in the past.”

When Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents visited the district’s offices, administrators said they had heard that Grover was telling other people that she had used her mother’s account to cast votes, the warrant says. Nine students and teachers gave written statements claiming that Grover had talked about using the account or that they had seen her access it during her time in high school.

“I have known that Emily Grover logs in to her moms school account in order to access grades and test scores since freshman year when we became friends,” one student wrote, according to the arrest warrant. “She has looked up my student ID before in order to tell me what I got on my FSA [Florida Standards Assessments] and ACT [American College Test].”

Another witness wrote that Grover had logged in to her mom’s account during her sophomore-year reading class to share grades and other information.

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“She did not seem like logging in was a big deal and seemed very comfortable doing so,” the witness wrote, according to the warrant.

The district’s information technology manager then conducted an analysis of Carroll’s account and the fake homecoming votes.

Of the 372 high school students’ records that Carroll had accessed in the past year, 339 were allegedly from Grover’s school. Carroll had accessed the records of 212 students from that school in October alone, prosecutors allege. And of 39 false homecoming queen votes, Carroll had allegedly looked at every one of those students’ accounts in the month before the election.

This makes it clear that technology, which is supposed to be “secure,” can always be manipulated when you have the right connections.

Fortunately, the audit in Maricopa County looks like the first promising deep dive to get to the bottom of what happened in the 2020 presidential election.

If people can face 16 years in prison for rigging a high school election, shouldn’t the consequences for tampering with a national election be much worse?