Strange Diplomacy Loss

Playing as Venice with standard map on King.

There were 5 civs left and no city states left (I bought them all up with Merchants of Venice). Here were the votes available to each civ:

Zulu - 10 votes (4 + 2 for host + 2 for world religion + 2 for world wonder)
Venice - 6 votes (4 + 2 for world religion)
Portugal - 6 votes (4 + 2 for world religion)
Germany - 4 votes
Incas - 4 votes

so that's 30 votes total....but only 7 was needed to elect a world leader??? So zulu voted for themselves and won the game despite being a failed warmonger that was pretty insignificant at that stage of the game (down to a could cities and had lost their capital). All other leaders voted for themselves as well.

Venice was a few turns away from a culture victory (trying to get finish it off before Incas went into space)

How does this result make any sense??

Turns out that you really don't actually have to practice good diplomacy in BNW. The AI always votes for itself, so actually practicing good diplomacy is irrelevant. You just have to bribe city states and horde votes.

Yeah, the game decides how many votes are needed to win a diplomatic victory based on how many city-states (and full civs maybe?) are left. Since you turned all the cities states into puppets, the number of votes needed to win went way down.

Sucks to lose like that though

This is the reason people shouldn't worry too much about Venice buying up city states. It no longer prevents a win, it just makes whoever has the most votes through other means win. You literally bought yourself to a loss and gave SHAKA of all people a diplo win. LOL.