Emily Grover, 18, and her mother, Laura Carroll, were both arrested months after Grover won Homecoming queen, for allegedly casting fake votes to help the teen win.
They spoke exclusively with ABC News “Good Morning America” on Thursday, and denied the allegations.
“I had a feeling I knew what it was about,” Grover shared during her interview with ABC News correspondent Will Reeve’s.
“When [the school official] questioned me, he didn’t really question me. He just said, ‘Look, we have all these statements, and we know you did it…that I rigged the election,” Grover stated.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) began their investigation into Gover and Carroll in November of 2020, after the Escambia County School District reported suspicious activity had occurred to hundreds of student account, according to ABC News. (RELATED: Florida Teen Faces 16 Years In Prison For Rigging Homecoming Queen Election)
Carroll, at the time, was an assistant principal at the nearby Bellview Elementary School, and would have had access to the student records via the district’s internal system, FOCUS. According to ABC News, investigators found that since August of 2019, Carroll’s account had accessed 339 records for Tate high school students.
Additionally, authorities found that 117 of the fraudulent votes were from the same IP address, and both traced back to Carroll, according to a Facebook post by the FDLE. Over 100 additional votes were allegedly cast from Carroll’s phone and home computer, said the FDLE.
A mother-and-daughter duo face up to 16 years in prison for reportedly rigging homecoming elections at a Florida high school. pic.twitter.com/4vGVgHhjej
— The Real (@TheRealDaytime) July 13, 2021
But Carroll claims that they have evidence that proves that her daughter couldn’t have cast the fraudulent votes, but did not disclose the evidence during the interview.
“We do have forensics people, and we have an investigator that are helping us to try to explain it … There’s evidence to prove that she could not possibly have done that,” she said to Reeves.
At around the same time law enforcement discovered where the fraudulent votes supposedly originated from, the district’s school council coordinator had been notified that Grover bragged about using her mom’s FOCUS account to cast votes, USA Today reported. (RELATED: Mom, Daughter Arrested For Allegedly Hacking Into Homecoming Election, Rigging Votes)
Grover said she had “a lot” of alibis but refused to divulge further.
The mother and daughter shared during their exclusive interview that they have become outcasts in their hometown.
“It was hard to watch, and you can’t do anything about it … We couldn’t go anywhere because this was national news,” Carroll said.
Although offered a plea deal, Carroll and Grover are choosing to fight the allegations in court.
“We did not do what they say we did, and I’m not willing to plead out to something that I didn’t do,” said Carroll.
“I wasn’t going to either,” said Grover.