A mum and daughter have been accused of rigging a high school homecoming queen election.
Laura Rose Carroll, 50, and Emily Rose Grover, 17, allegedly hacked into student accounts in Cantonment, Florida to fix the vote for the teenager.
Both Carroll, an assistant principal, and her daughter have been arrested and taken into custody.
They are said to have cast nearly 250 bogus votes in Tate High School’s Homecoming Court, where Grover was a student.
She ultimately won the title of homecoming queen, according to reports.
But hundreds of votes were flagged as being fake last October.
Investigators said 117 originated from the same IP address within a short period of time.
A probe was launched last November after the Escambia County School District reported unauthorised access into hundreds of student accounts.
Carroll, an assistant principal at a separate elementary school, had access to district’s student information system, police say.
Authorities say a total of 246 votes had been cast from accounts accessed by computers inside their Pensacola home or from Carroll’s mobile phone.
The teen had even boasted about using her mother’s account, known as FOCUS, to cast votes, it is claimed.
Starting in August 2019, Carroll’s account allegedly accessed 372 high school records.
Of those, 339 belonged to students at Tate.
She has been suspended from her job while her daughter was expelled from her high school.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement said in a statement: “Multiple students reported that the daughter described using her mother’s FOCUS account to cast votes.”
The mum and daughter were arrested on a string of charges, including unlawful use of a two-way communications device and criminal use of personally identifiable information.
Carroll was arrested on Monday and booked into the Escambia County Jail, with a bond set at $8,500 (£6,000).
Her daughter was taken into custody and transferred to the Escambia Regional Juvenile Detention Centre.
A man identifying himself as Carroll’s husband told CNN: “We have no comment right now.
“Our lawyers told us not to speak and we will have our day in court.”