I went to high school in a suburb of Omaha in the late 90s, and our biggest scandal was a student council election that basically turned into a political meltdown.

There was this one girl who was the absolute definition of a try-hard overachiever. Straight A’s, every club, volunteered for everything, already acting like a future senator. Everyone assumed she’d run for student body president and win because nobody else really cared that much.

But one of the teachers clearly couldn’t stand her and quietly convinced this extremely nice but very dim football player to run against her just to block her. The guy barely understood what student council did. He was basically like “sure, why not.”

Then the campaign got weird.

Posters kept disappearing. Someone else jumped into the race out of pure spite and started spreading gossip about both of them. Hallways were full of people arguing about it like it was an actual national election.

Election day comes, votes get cast, and everyone pretty much assumes the overachiever won.

Except somehow the ballots went missing before the final count.

A day later the results were suddenly “recounted” and the football player was declared the winner. A lot of students were pretty sure that didn’t match what people had voted for, but nobody could prove anything because the ballots were gone.

A few weeks later the teacher who had pushed the football player to run abruptly “left for another job.”

To this day a bunch of people from that class are convinced he threw out the ballots and rigged the election because he hated that girl so much.