A Florida teen charged with rigging the homecoming election will stand trial as an adult.
A Florida teen charged as an adult with conspiring with her mother to rig the election for homecoming queen.
Emily Rose Grover was seventeen years old when she and her mother were arrested for hacking student accounts and casting nearly 250 fake ballots in order to win homecoming.
Grover, however, turned 18 last month, and the State Attorney’s Office in Escambia County announced Tuesday that she will face charges as an adult, Fox News said.
Grover and her girlfriend, 50-year-old Laura Rose Carroll, are charged with multiple felonies in connection with a vote repair at Tate High School in Pensacola in October. Carroll is an assistant principal at the same county’s Bellview Elementary School.
A month after the election, Escambia County School District officials confirmed unauthorized access to student accounts, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
According to investigators, 117 votes came from the same IP address during a brief span of time.
The FDLE reported that a total of 246 votes were cast from accounts accessed via computers within the mother and daughter’s Pensacola home or via Carroll’s smartphone.
According to some classmates, Grover boasted about voting using her mother’s school district account. Carroll’s account accessed 372 high school documents, 339 of which were Tate alumni, investigators discovered.
The mother and daughter were charged with unauthorized use of a two-way communication device and illegal use of personally identifiable information. Carroll is being held without bail on a $6,000 bond, while Grover is being held on a $2,000 bond. Each defendant faces a maximum sentence of 16 years in prison on the charges.
Carroll’s employment status was unclear, but officials said she had been suspended.
Grover was removed from her high school, according to the Associated Press.
The Escambia County State Attorney’s Office did not return a call from the Post on Tuesday.
