Dancing With The Stars Scoring

Dancing With The Stars is a 'reality' tv show where they pair up celebrities with professional dancers and have them do various dances. There's a panel of judges that assign scores to the dances each week and they get people to call/text/vote online for who they like best. Then they combine the votes with the scores somehow and figure out who came last in a given week. That pair is fired. Repeat until you have a winner.

This is different than other reality shows like American Idol which is entirely vote based, or The Apprentice which is entirely judge based, or Survivor which is determined by the contestants themselves. Now, I actually don't watch any of those shows and for the most part never have. (I watched some of Survivor when it first came out but got annoyed when they wouldn't let Canadians play.) But I understand the scoring systems for all of them despite only seeing most of them while visiting family in New Brunswick...

I actually watch Dancing With The Stars, but had no clue how the loser was actually determined. How is voting combined with judges scores? What does voting actually do? I turned to my good friend Mr Google and he hooked me up with the answer in a really short amount of time. It turns out to be a pretty simple system. They add all of the judges scores together and work out what percentage of that pool each pair received. Then you separately add up all the votes and work out what percentage of those each pair received. Add the two percentages together and see who has the lowest total.

I was thinking I'd crunch some numbers to see what votes actually had to happen for different possible outcomes to happen but it turns out they don't release total vote totals anywhere that I could find. Also, I found a site that already crunches the numbers in terms of votes per million... It's interesting to think about the consequences of such a system...


One other interesting site I stumbled across in my search is Vote For The Worst which apparently watches all voting based reality television, picks someone who is really bad, and then encourages people to vote for them. I can't help but wonder if these people actually accomplish anything. And if they do, how bad is it?