How to Vote for 'Dancing With the Stars' Before 6:45 p.m. in L.A.

Votes are counted during the East Coast airing, and ABC's website crashed Tuesday, leaving text as the only way in.

Anyone in California voting on Dancing With the Stars gets about 105 minutes, starting at 5 p.m. Pacific. Voting runs live during the East Coast broadcast and closes shortly after the last performance of the night, The Hollywood Reporter reported in its season 35 premiere recap. On this coast that works out to a cutoff around 6:45 p.m.

Which is the part catching people out. Leave work at six, sit on the 10, walk in the door at seven, and the show is still playing on your television while your vote is already worthless.

Tuesday made it worse. Online voting through ABC's website went down during the live show, and host Alfonso Ribeiro told viewers the show would take votes by text only that night, the outlet reported.

The math the votes feed is simple enough: each episode sends home the couple whose judges' marks and viewer votes add up to the lowest total. A 12 from the judges isn't a death sentence on its own, and a 21 isn't a safe harbor either, which is the whole reason the phones matter.

The audience is bigger than it's been in years. Preliminary Nielsen numbers showed the first premiere episode drew 6.67 million viewers, up 24 percent from last year's 5.38 million and the most-watched DWTS premiere since season 29 in September 2020, The Hollywood Reporter reported.

Season 35 split its premiere by gender. The eight male celebrities danced Tuesday, Sept. 15, each to a No. 1 song from the year they were born. Grey's Anatomy actor Harry Shum Jr. topped the men's leaderboard with a 21 out of 30 alongside partner Jenna Johnson. Conner Leavitt, husband of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star Whitney Leavitt, was the season's first elimination; his partner was Adele Zaikman, who won Dancing With the Stars: The Next Pro.

The eight women took the floor Wednesday. The top of their leaderboard:

• Maura Higgins and Mark Ballas: 21/30
• Amber Glenn and Pasha Pashkov: 18/30
• Julia Stiles and Ezra Sosa: 18/30

Below them:

• Giada De Laurentiis and Alan Bersten: 16/30
• Ciara Miller and Brandon Armstrong: 15/30
• Tatyana Ali and Jan Ravnik: 12/30

Jenna Dewan and Val Chmerkovskiy and Sarah Jane Nader and Hailey Bills hadn't been scored when those six went up, and Wednesday's elimination hadn't been announced.

The season airs Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 8 p.m., simulcast on ABC and Disney+, with episodes streaming on Hulu the next day. If you're watching in Los Angeles and you plan to vote, the phone comes out at five.

Source: hollywoodreporter.com, retrieved September 17, 2026.