When Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election took place, opposition candidate María Corina Machado had already been barred from running against the country’s authoritarian leadership. International observers were excluded. Transparent verification mechanisms were denied to ordinary citizens. The opposition had disputed the legitimacy of Venezuelan elections for years without ever being able to prove it. In 2026, the campaign built to solve that problem, “600K Network,” won the Grand Prix for Good and a Titanium Lion at Cannes Lions, the festival’s two most significant individual honours.
The Vulnerability
Every official Venezuelan ballot tally sheet carries a printed QR code as part of the standard voting process. Comando Con Venezuela, the political organisation built to support María Corina Machado’s opposition movement, and creative agency Rainbow Lobster identified that code as the single overlooked weak point in an otherwise tightly controlled electoral system. If ordinary citizens could independently photograph and verify those codes at scale, they could build a parallel record of the vote outside the control of the electoral authority that was expected to manipulate the official count.
The Operation
Comando Con Venezuela secretly trained and mobilised more than 600,000 volunteers, deploying them across more than 15,000 voting centres and 30,000 individual voting tables nationwide. Using nothing more than their own smartphones, volunteers captured the QR-coded tally sheets at their assigned polling stations, verified the data, and transmitted it to a centralised database, building a transparent, independently auditable record of the election in real time. The network collected an estimated 85% of all voting tallies nationwide. Communications had to be protected under conditions of significant political risk, including, according to details later shared at Cannes, the use of antennas hidden inside watermelons to keep transmission lines secure during the vote.
When the country’s leadership declared a result without publishing the supporting ballots, the opposition coalition was able to present extensive, independently collected evidence directly from the polling stations themselves. The Associated Press subsequently reported a 30-point gap between the officially declared result and the actual results documented by the network, a finding corroborated by The Carter Centre and The Washington Post.
What It Achieved
The collected data was published on the platform resultadosconvzla.com and used by international observers and media organisations to independently analyse the disputed election. The 600K Network’s documentation became a central piece of evidence in international discussions surrounding the vote and contributed directly to global calls for greater transparency around it. In 2025, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded María Corina Machado the Nobel Peace Prize, specifically citing the democratic movement that mobilised citizens to document and defend the electoral process.
The Cannes Recognition
At Cannes Lions 2026, 600K Network won two Gold Lions, in Creative Data and PR, before going on to win the Titanium Lion and the Grand Prix for Good, the highest honour the festival gives. Sebastián Arrechedera, founder of Rainbow Lobster and one of the project’s lead creatives, described its origin and intent: “This is a piece that belongs to all Venezuelans. It really was a collective effort. What mattered most was that this story be known, that everyone here understands what happened in Venezuela. This is how creativity can help tell a truth.”
The Cannes jury’s framing, delivered as the festival closed, centred on what the project represented beyond advertising: creativity functioning as democratic infrastructure when formal institutions fail. Jury chair Marco Sobhani noted that what convinced the jury was not the political figure attached to the project but the demonstration that a creative idea had restored hope where other methods, including diplomatic ones, had not succeeded.
The award arrived under difficult circumstances. As the team celebrated in Cannes, news broke of a 7.5-magnitude earthquake that had struck several regions of Venezuela, leaving widespread destruction and casualties, a reminder that the story behind the campaign was still actively unfolding.
Campaign Name: 600K Network
Agency Name: Rainbow Lobster, Mexico City
Brand Name: Comando Con Venezuela
Location: Venezuela (national); presented internationally at Cannes Lions 2026, France
