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Taylor Swift Performing At School For The Deaf?
Internet trolls did such a good job hijacking Pitbull’s Walmart contest in July that the pranksters are now targeting Taylor Swift. Instead of sending her to Alaska, the troublemakers hope she’ll go to Alton, Mass., to play for The Horace Mann School For The Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
Presented by textbook rental company Chegg and Papa John’s pizza, the contest is open to accredited colleges and high schools in the 48 continental U.S. states. In addition to a grand prize of an intimate acoustic concert from Swift, the top five schools with the most votes will each receive a $10,000 grant for their music department.
The prank to try to rack up as many votes as possible for the Horace Mann School was apparently started by users on the imageboard website 4chan. Reddit caught on to the joke and the votes keep coming in.
Photo: AP Photo
Walmart Stores Inc. shareholders’ meeting, Fayetteville, Ark.
In a post Aug. 30, the Atlantic Wire reported that Horace Mann had a total of 17,707 votes. As far as we can tell, the only way to check how many votes a school has is to log in to Facebook and vote for it. And so – for scientific purposes – we voted for Horace Mann earlier this morning and found that the school had a total of 50,275 votes.
The Boston Globe writes that the contest has “evolved into a more generous project” with many people voting for Horace Mann “because they believe that Swift’s visit would be positive for students.”
After all, as Boston.com points out, people who are deaf and hard of hearing can enjoy music through vibrations and visuals.
Horace Mann headmaster Jeremiah Ford told Boston.com the school would love to have Swift perform.
“There are accommodations that make music come alive for deaf people,” Ford said. “They have different abilities. They’re not disabled. They’re not impaired. It might have been done with mal intent, and shame on them, but what a great opportunity for us.”
You can vote once per day now until Sept. 23 at 11:50 PDT. To enter the contest, head over to TaylorSwiftOnCampus.com. You must “like” the official Taylor Swift Facebook page and then type in the name of the school you’d like to vote for.
The winners will be announced Oct. 5. The show will take place “in an area at or near the grand prize winning school during the week of Oct. 15, 2012 or on an alternate date depending on Taylor Swift’s availability.”