‘Dancing With the Stars’: How Are Scores & Votes Counted? Elimination Method, Explained

Guillermo Rodriguez has made it to Week 5 of Dancing With the Stars, despite having the lowest judges’ scores each week. This is nothing new. In fact, it’s a similar story to what we saw with Andy Richter last season, when the comedian finished in seventh place, beating several contestants who were dancing at a higher level than him.

Perhaps the most jarring example, though, was when Bobby Bones actually won Season 27 after consistently scoring lower than other contestants that year. To this day, his win remains controversial among Dancing With the Stars fans.

But the reason for the success of these celebs comes down to the fan vote. The decisions on DWTS aren’t made on the judges’ scores alone. Rather, the weekly eliminations are based off who has the lowest combined scores and votes from viewers at home.

Rodriguez scored six points below the next lowest person on the leaderboard this week, and eight points below Ciara Miller, who was ultimately sent home, leading to questions about how much weight the scores and votes each hold.

Showrunner Conrad Green confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter in 2025 that “it’s 50/50, effectively.” Each couple receives points based on where they fall in the ranking of both judges’ scores and viewer votes.

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“When you see the judges’ leaderboards, say there’s five couples and you’re in first place on that leaderboard, you get five judges ranking points,” he explained. “If you’re in second place, you get four, if you’re in third place, you get three, [fourth place,] two, [and fifth place,] one.

The same goes for the public vote. In this scenario, the contestant with the highest number of public votes would earn five points, and so on. “You add those two [separate] ranking points together, and the couple with the lowest combined total of those ranking points goes home,” Green clarified. “And if there’s a tie on those ranking points, the couple with the fewest public votes goes home.”

More recently, fans have demanded to see the numbers for themselves, but Green said he would “prefer not to” share the specifics. “[That] has a very strong chance of disincentivizing people taking part or might affect the votes going forward because people understand who to vote for,” he explained. “In all kinds of ways, like any election or vote, you don’t want to be prejudicing the election or vote.”

@lindsarnold Hope this helps 🤗 #grwmchat #grwmroutine #grwm #dwts ♬ original sound – Lindsay Arnold Cusick

Former pro Lindsay Arnold also broke down the scoring and voting in a 2023 TikTok, confirming that eliminations are determined by a 50/50 split of scores and votes. “Try to think of this in a pie,” she began. “We’ve got our pie, which makes up 100% of either the votes or scores. Each couple is going to get a different percentage of those scores. The people who get lower scores, they’re only getting a 25% piece of that score pie, whereas someone with higher scores is maybe getting a 75% piece of that score pie.”

The same goes for votes, with Arnold clarifying, “We’ve got a pie for votes. Maybe one couple’s getting 50% of that piece of pie of votes, maybe someone’s getting 75%, maybe they’re getting 10%. Then you add those two together.”

Quite simply, Arnold explained, “Sometimes the bottom of the leaderboard couple maybe only has 25% of that score pie, but they got 80% of the vote pie, and that surpasses some people who maybe had higher scores and vice versa.” She said everything “evens itself out because if you have low scores, but you’re getting a majority of votes, that could be enough to help you surpass somebody who’s maybe getting higher scores. But also if you have a really high scores, but low votes, that could keep you in because those scores would help.”

Dancing With the Stars, Season 35, Tuesdays, 8/7c, ABC and Disney+