judges-only proxy
Vote vs judges: historic upsets (proxy only)
36 top-half-on-judges eliminations as a vote-tension proxy; no actual vote totals in dataset.
Note: This story is marked as a judges-only proxy.
Ballroom Data · Artometrics-style report · Nov 3, 2026 (America/Los_Angeles)
Headline
We find 36 eliminations where the departing celeb was still in the top half of that week’s judge scores. Examples include week-9/10 exits who were literally #1 on judges that night. This is not a true vote dataset — ABC does not publish vote totals — so treat these as a judges-only proxy for “shock exits,” not a ranked upset bible.
No fan-vote totals in dataset. These are judge-leaderboard surprises only — true vote/judge conflicts need vote shares from secondary reporting.
Highest-ranked exits (on judges)
| Season | Week | Celebrity | Judges rank | Field | Judge mean |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14 | 9 | Maria Menounos | 1 | 4 | 9.833 |
| 20 | 9 | Nastia Liukin | 1 | 4 | 10.000 |
| 21 | 9 | Alexa PenaVega | 1 | 6 | 10.000 |
| 22 | 9 | Wanyá Morris | 1 | 5 | 10.000 |
| 23 | 10 | Terra Jolé | 1 | 5 | 10.000 |
| 24 | 6 | Heather Morris | 1 | 8 | 10.000 |
| 24 | 9 | Simone Biles | 1 | 4 | 10.000 |
| 27 | 8 | Juan Pablo Di Pace | 1 | 6 | 10.000 |
| 1 | 4 | Rachel Hunter | 2 | 4 | 8.333 |
| 9 | 9 | Joanna Krupa | 2 | 4 | 9.000 |
| 11 | 6 | Audrina Patridge | 2 | 7 | 8.000 |
| 14 | 8 | Roshon Fegan | 2 | 6 | 9.333 |
Methods & caveats
Proxy definition: eliminated celeb ranked in the top half of judge means that week (field size ≥4). Many “#1 exits” occur in tiny late fields and may be dance-off / bottom-two mechanics. For a true upset catalog, merge secondary reporting on vote outcomes — out of scope for this build.
Coverage: seasons 1–35; 3,602 performances; 11,027 individual judge marks in the cleaned Ballroom Data SQLite build (Nov 3, 2026, America/Los_Angeles).
Known gaps: Season 31 Mirrorball winner is not tagged as Winners in the performance table (Charli D’Amelio / Mark Ballas is missing from our winners extract). Seasons 33–35 largely lack Kaggle ages/hometowns. Season 35 celebrity names in the wiki scrape are often first-name-only or garbled. Dance-style strings still include some unclean variants. We never impute missing values.
Sources: howisonlab/dwts_dataset (GitHub); Kaggle brupley/dancing-with-the-stars-dataset (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wikipedia DWTS season pages for seasons 32–35 (CC BY-SA 4.0). Scores are per-judge means on a 0–10 scale so 3-judge and 4-judge weeks are comparable. Marathons/relays/megamixes are excluded from style averages unless noted.
Disclaimer: Unofficial fan analysis. Not affiliated with BBC Worldwide, Disney, or ABC.
Downloads
Quarto source, rendered report, chart exports (PNG/SVG), and the analysis CSV.
