Adele Zaikman won a spinoff for the right to be a DWTS pro, then went out first on a night the voting site crashed
Two men in this cast have the same first name spelled one letter apart, and American fans vote by texting a first name to a five-digit number. On premiere night the online ballot collapsed and those texts were all that counted. The professional who went home has finally given her account of it.
Adele Zaikman spent a whole television series earning the right to stand on the Dancing With the Stars floor. She won DWTS: The Next Pro, the spinoff built to find one new professional out of twelve, and became its first champion. Three weeks later she was the first pro sent home from season 35, and she has now said out loud what fans have been arguing about: the night she went out, the voting did not work properly.
Her celebrity partner was Conner Leavitt, who came to national attention through the first season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives in 2024. They scored 12 out of 30 for a salsa to Tag Team's "Whoomp! There It Is!" on the first night of the two-part premiere, 15 September, and were eliminated before the female celebrities had even danced.
Two things went wrong at once
The first was traffic. Julianne Hough announced on night two that the premiere was the show's highest-rated in nine years, which is excellent news for ABC and was terrible news for anyone trying to vote on ABC.com — the site buckled under the volume, and texting became the only route through.
The second problem was a coincidence of spelling. Fans text a celebrity's first name to a five-digit number. Season 35 contains both Conner Leavitt and the podcaster Connor Wood. One letter apart, one keyword each, one text window, and fan votes make up half of what decides an elimination.
"I feel like being eliminated, obviously, is not something I'm happy about. I'm sad about it. I'm sad that the journey was short. However, I do understand that this is a competition, and things can happen. Sometimes, people vote for you, sometimes they don't," Zaikman said on the podcast Fire Chats: The Mindfire Pod.
Asked directly whether the mess cost her the season, she went about as far as a working pro can go. "Maybe the voting issue made it complicated," she said, before closing the door on it: "There's nothing I can do right now. I can't turn back time. I can't fix the voting system."
The number that makes it awkward
Leavitt and Zaikman were not the lowest-scoring couple on the floor that night. That was Guillermo Rodriguez, the Jimmy Kimmel Live sidekick, dancing with Witney Carson — the pro who won season 34. They took a 10 out of 30 and stayed.
- Zaikman is an Israeli-Ukrainian ballroom dancer and the first winner of DWTS: The Next Pro, which put twelve dancers through an audition gauntlet for one job.
- Her Next Pro castmates Selena Hamilton, Allen Genkin and Erik Linder danced a salsa bumper with her during the premiere.
- Season 35 opened across two nights, 15 and 16 September, with eight male celebrities first and eight female celebrities second.
- Half of each elimination is fan votes; the other half is the judges' score.
- Conner Leavitt is married to Whitney Leavitt, who competed on season 34 of the same show.
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What she is actually angry about
Not the score, and not the elimination. Zaikman drew the line somewhere else entirely, and it is the part of the interview that has least to do with ballroom.
"What hurts is the outside noise and the comments on social media. I feel like me even getting eliminated was not as painful in a way as what people have to say because people don't even know me. You don't even know my partner. You don't know what we've been through," she said.
Leavitt has described the same week in similar terms, saying the exit gave people a licence to throw his past back at him. Neither ABC nor the show has said whether the online votes that never registered would have changed anything, and nobody outside the production can check. What is on the record is narrow and unhelpful: the site crashed, the online half of the audience vote was dropped, the texts decided it, and two names on the list differed by one letter.
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