It's possible to win a DV before they can even vote to remove points from you, and I'm trying to prove it but it's hard....well, at least on Deity. Perhaps I should try on an easier difficulty level first, but YOLO.
What makes it so difficult is you have to play as Sweden, you have to build all 3 of those wonders (Potola Palace, Mahabodi Temple, and Statue of Liberty), AND this means you have to found a religion. It is hard to found a religion as Sweden on Deity, let me tell you. (Well you don't technically HAVE to play Sweden, but they have to be in the game and you have to win their competition which is more or less rigged for them to win anyway.)
Not to mention: Your Holy Site, which needs to basically be the 3rd thing you build, needs to be by a forest, and you need to have a hill by a mountain as well as a place to put a Harbor that has free coastline next to it.
Your build order needs to basically be Slinger > Settler > Holy Site > Shrine -- and this GREATLY slows you down in the early game, for a civ that already has ZERO help there. It's super easy for the AI to overpower you. So you need to make sure to snag those 3 key locations (hardest of which is a hill near a mountain) whilst not pissing off the AI just so you can make it through the early game. Not to mention, you also have to cripple yourself by going for fairly useless civics like Mysticism, Drama and Poetry, and Theology. You also have to more or less beeline Astronomy and Civil Engineering, and hope to build 3 wonders before the AI! Luckily, they are not highly sought after wonders so that part isn't as hard as it might seem.
It also helps to turn disasters up to 4, and this is yet another thing to screw you over in the mid game.
But if all of this works, that means you'll have 8 DV points without even worrying about the world congress. If the world congress starts on turn, say, 95 (and it will start later than usual because you have to cripple yourself so much and the era is based on an average of all civs, which you are dragging down) then that means you're set to win on turn 245 if you get 2 points from each one. But usually, this will be "too late" and you'll already be in the modern era. However if there's even just ONE emergency, and you manage to win it, you can win circa turn 215, which should be before the modern era.
If you manage to get lucky enough to get TWO emergencies, you could even win circa turn 185. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
It's SUPER hard to do as it requires major early game crippling to do as well as the stars need to basically align for you. I've tried it time and time again and often lose because of my own stupidity or oversight but I'm going to get there one day! Heh. And I'm only trying as Deity because it doesn't mean much to me, personally, to do it on any other difficulty.
