An assistant director in Florida and his 17-year-old daughter were arrested Monday for allegedly hacking school computers to prepare for a re-election of queens, authorities reported.
Laura Rose Carroll, 50, is accused of using her privileged access to the Exchange County School District’s internal system to cast false votes on her daughter, according to the Florida Police Department.
The teenager, who was named the 2020 return queen of Tate High School last fall, is also said to have been involved in the fraud.
Officers began investigating the matter in October, when hundreds of votes for the school’s back-to-school court were marked as fraudulent, with 117 of them coming from the same IP address.
Investigators found that Carroll, an assistant principal at Bellview Elementary School, and his daughter had allegedly accessed the FOCUS accounts of several students. FOCUS is the school district’s student information system.
Evidence showed that a total of 246 votes had been cast from the accounts accessed by computers inside the mother and daughter’s Pensacola house or from Carroll’s mobile phone, the FDLE said.
Several students also told investigators that Carroll’s daughter had boasted of using her mother’s FOCUS account to vote.
The mother and daughter received several charges with various charges, including illegal use of a two-way communication device and criminal use of personally identifiable information.
District Superintendent Tim Smith told the Pensacola News Journal that Carroll has been suspended from his job, but declined to comment. Her daughter was expelled from her high school.
Carroll was detained at the Escambia County Jail on $ 8,500 bail. Her daughter was detained at the Eschania Regional Juvenile Detention Center.
It was unclear if they had a lawyer who could comment.