Sen. Bernie Sander (I., Vt.) on Sunday said there needs to be "more transparency" at the Democratic National Committee and it needs to make fundamental changes to open the doors to independent voters.
"Face the Nation" host John Dickerson said that he has heard from several lifelong Democrats about being irritated by Sanders offering advice to the Democratic Party when he is not registered as a Democrat. He then asked Sanders how he would respond to those critics.
"Well, it may irritate them, but it does not irritate the American people," Sanders said. "Look, one of the problems facing the Democratic Party is that it has got to open up its doors. The truth is that neither the Democratic Party or the Republican Party today are held in very high esteem by the American people."
He went on to say that there are more Independents than Democrats or Republicans and that it is "totally absurd" for Democrats not to welcome them into the party, calling it a "recipe for failure."
"In my view, the Democratic Party needs to make fundamental changes. We need to do away with the extraordinary number of superdelegates that now exist in the presidential nominating process. [We've] got to do away with closed primaries, got to reform the caucus system to allow everybody to vote, and you need more transparency at the DNC," Sanders said.
"A lot of money goes through there. People need to know how. We need a 50-state strategy, so that half the states in this country have a Democratic Party, which today does not exist," Sanders added.
Sanders' comments follow a recent report by Donna Brazile, the former interim chairwoman at the DNC, on an agreement between the DNC and the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign. Brazile claimed in her recently released book, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House, that she found "solid proof" of her "suspicions" that "Hillary Clinton's team had rigged the nomination process" against Sanders in the Democratic primary.
Brazile has spent the last week repeatedly walking back or outright refuting her own written claims that the Democratic primary process was rigged in favor of Clinton.
Sanders on Thursday night said that no "sane human being" doesn’t believe his presidential campaign in 2016 wasn’t taking on the DNC in the primary.
"I don’t think there’s any sane human being who doesn’t believe that my campaign was taking on the entire establishment, including the DNC," Sanders told CNN host Anderson Cooper.