Florida Teen Charged as an Adult for Rigging Homecoming Election with Mom

A Florida teenager who rigged her high school’s homecoming election will be tried as an adult.

Emily Rose Grover was arrested in March when she was still 17-years-old. She turned 18 the following month, and the State Attorney’s Office in Escambia County decided to move forward with adult charges. Her mother, Laura Rose Carroll, is also facing charges for the rigged vote.

Carroll was employed as an assistant principal at Bellview Elementary School in the Escambia County School District. To ensure that her daughter won homecoming queen at Tate High School in Pensacola, Carroll accessed the school district’s internal system and cast fraudulent votes in favor of Grover. An investigation into the fraud was launched in November after the district reported unauthorized access to hundreds of student accounts.

Investigators discovered that in October, 117 votes for the school’s homecoming election were flagged as fraudulent. All of the suspicious ballots came from the same IP address over a short period. The inquiry also yielded evidence that showed Carroll accessed the school system from her cell phone and computers at home. In total, 246 votes were cast for homecoming court from those devices.

Several Tate students told police that Grover bragged about using her mother’s school system access and watching her mother access records. Since August 2019, Carroll’s account accessed 372 high school records, and 339 of those were Tate students.

Carroll has been suspended from her job, and Grover was kicked out of Tate High School. According to prosecutors, the mother and daughter scammers are each charged with unlawful use of a two-way communications device, criminal use of personally identifiable information, and conspiracy to commit those offenses.

Carroll is currently free on a $6,000 bond, while Grover is out on a $2,000 bond. They each face 16 years in prison.