AFAICT, neither woman changed grades or test scores or actually harmed any other students. That’s one reason I’d be surprised if there were jail time involved. OTOH, the breech of privacy is pretty serious–not for the Homecoming election but for the rest of it; hence my hunch there’ll be probation.
As far as the less-serious Homecoming election fraud goes, I really wish schools would do away with all this royalty stuff altogether, as it’s become increasingly contentious. From the tirades and threats of lawsuits from parents, you’d think there was a lot more at stake than a cheap tiara and a couple days of bragging rights. Despite tight controls on voting, ballot-retrieval, and ballot-counting at the school where I taught, there were always allegations of voting fraud because everybody knows my Becky’s the most popular, dammit.
The main question would be whether further punishment would help, or if her expulsion and legal troubles are themselves sufficient deterrent to future action.
If it was just one time using her mom’s credentials to hack some votes, I probably would agree that this was unnecessary. It’s the other stuff that gives me pause—especially since the mom keeps being implicated as well.
She was definitely quite brazen about her attacks, though. That could show a lack of remorse, or just a lack of understanding of how serious her actions were. The latter would lead me to suspect that the current punishment is enough. But the former would not.
The kid could have never used the system unless her mother, the principal of the school, gave her the access credentials to a very powerful database that only a handful of people have in an entire school district. This is dereliction of duty and a violation of a vital trust. It is also indicative of a horrible character flaw.
Though the kid is certainly responsible for her own actions, she is also the victim of horrible parenting. This has to be taken into account.
However, as I’ve already said, I would show no mercy to the mother who exposed her entire district’s clientele. We’re talking EVERYTHING: your names, place of employment, medical history, criminal record, current address(es), past address(es), phone numbers, your child(ren)'s medical history, relatives, THEIR addresses, etc, etc, etc.
When the TX arrived in the movie, “Terminator III, Rise of the Machines”, she accessed the Los Angeles school district database for information on her targets. That’s Powerschool. Trust me, they were toast when she did that. That was probably the most realistic part of the movie. I have complete access to Powerschool, and my password is 26 characters long.
Just in case I’m not the only one who’s curious, I dug a little deeper, and learned that the system was able to flag the rigged votes as probably fraudulent, which triggered an investigation.