How eliminations are decided on Dancing with the Stars: The role of fan votes and judges' scores

ABC Network and Disney+’s Dancing with the Stars is currently on its thirty-fourth season. The show has already seen numerous emotional and dramatic eliminations, as well as the reality show judges marking each contestant, which ultimately leads to their expulsion from the house.

The show usually has three judges on the panel who are deciding factors behind the future of each star: Carrie Ann Inaba, Derek Hough and Bruno Tonioli.

The judges have not publicly shared their scoring metric for each contestant; however, the show's hosts, Alfonso Ribeiro and Julianne Hough, have stated that every week, the star couple with the lowest combined total score will be eliminated.

So far on Dancing with the Stars, six contestants have been eliminated from the scoreboard, and Andy Richter, a professional comedian, ended up at the bottom of the leaderboard.

However, on the October 28, 2025, episode, which was a Halloween special, Andy was not in the bottom three. Two former stars of the show, Lindsay Arnold and Maksim Chmerkovskiy, weighed in on the entire scoring system on social media.

Role of fan votes and judges’ scores in deciding contestant eliminations on Dancing with the Stars

The two hosts of Dancing with the Stars, Alfonso Ribeiro and Julianne Hough, revealed that every week, the couple with the lowest score is the one that is eliminated. So far, in Season 34, NBA player Baron Davis, member of the band Fifth Harmony, Lauren Jauregui, Hilaria Baldwin, actor Corey Feldman, actress Jennifer Garner (not Jen Affleck), and Pentatonix’s Scott Hoying have been the ones who have been eliminated from the show. 

Former star Lindsay Arnold created a TikTok video in 2023, explaining the entire process of elimination. She shared that the score is calculated from fifty percent of the judges’ scores, coupled with fifty percent of viewers' votes.

She added that for better clarity, fans could think of the total as a hundred percent score pie. Discussing the judges’ scores, Arnold noted that celebrities who receive a low score typically account for a quarter of the total score, while others, who are higher scorers, may receive a score of up to seventy-five percent.

She gave an interview to E! News, where she reiterated the same sentiment about viewer votes. She said,

“Maybe one couple’s getting 50 percent of a piece of pie of votes, maybe someone’s getting 75 percent, maybe they’re getting 10 percent. And then you add those two [pies] together.”

Dancing with the Stars’ Lindsay also said that if someone received very low judges’ scores but got a high percentage of the viewer votes, that person would not be at the bottom of the leaderboard.

Another former star from the show, Maksim Chmerkovskiy, said that there is also a potential danger of judges giving out biased, favorable scores too early in the season.

In an interview podcast called Penthouse with Peta, he said,

“We should’ve stayed at fours or fives. And we should’ve continuously, gradually improved on this. Because right now, nothing’s going to separate the couples in judges’ scores. Therefore, almost 100 percent of the decision of the vote will go to the audience.”

Stay tuned for more updates.