Grammy Award-winning musician and Hillary Clinton supporter John Legend blasted the Democratic Party’s superdelegate system Tuesday, calling it “confusing” to voters.
In a series of tweets on Tuesday, Legend said his party’s superdelegate voting system provides cause for “suspicion” among liberal voters.
Superdelegates are the roughly 720 Democratic party insiders and elected officials who are free to vote for whomever they choose in the party’s primary race, regardless of the preferences of the majority of their respective state’s voters.
When confronted with the notion that “the people have decided,” Legend insisted that superdelegates were an unnecessary impediment to democracy.
“I agree. We don’t need super delegates,” he wrote to one Twitter user.
“[Superdelegates have] agreed every single time. So just let the people decide if super delegates are just agreeing anyway,” the ten-time Grammy award winning musician wrote to another Twitter user.
Legend’s criticism of the Democrats’ presidential nominating process came just one day after the Associated Press declared that frontrunner Hillary Clinton had secured enough delegates to clinch her party’s nomination.
The AP report included its own survey of superdelegates. Clinton’s chief rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), has repeatedly criticized the media for including superdelegates in its overall nomination counts, a practice the Democrat National Committee has itself discouraged.
Sanders’s campaign said Monday that it will take its fight to the Democrat National Convention in July, regardless of the AP report.
“Secretary Clinton does not have and will not have the requisite number of pledged delegates to secure the nomination. She will be dependent on superdelegates who do not vote until July 25 and who can change their minds between now and then,” Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs said Monday night. “They include more than 400 superdelegates who endorsed Secretary Clinton 10 months before the first caucuses and primaries and long before any other candidate was in the race.”
“Our job from now until the convention is to convince those superdelegates that Bernie is by far the strongest candidate against Donald Trump,” Briggs added.
Legend isn’t the only celebrity to have criticized the Democrat Party’s superdelegate system.
In March, Daredevil actress and staunch Bernie Sanders supporter Rosario Dawson told a crowd of the Vermont senator’s supporters to be wary of interference from the DNC, specifically calling out the party’s chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL).
“Deborah Wasserman Schultz said the reason superdelegates exist is specifically to push back against grassroots organizing,” Dawson said, referencing comments the chairwoman made in a February interview with CNN.
“The Democratic Party, we haven’t left them, they’ve left us,” she added.
Shortly after the AP declared Clinton the Democrat nominee on Monday, Legend headlined an election-eve concert for the former Secretary of State at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles alongside Stevie Wonder, Christina Aguilera and Ricky Martin.
“No matter what the AP says about who won the nomination, we need folks to vote tomorrow in all the races,” Legend told the sold-out crowd.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @jeromeehudson