North Carolina’s Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed legislation this week that would have purged self-admitted non-citizens from the state’s voter rolls.

The plan, supported by the state’s Republicans, would have allowed election officials to contact North Carolina residents who escaped jury duty by claiming they were not United States citizens. If those residents confirmed that they are non-citizens or did not respond within 30 days, they would be removed from the state’s voter rolls.

Cooper told local media he vetoed the plan because it would have created “a high risk of voter harassment and intimidation and could discourage citizens from voting.”

“Blocking legitimate voters from casting a ballot is a risk we cannot take when the law already prevents non-citizens from voting and has legitimate mechanisms to remove them from the rolls,” Cooper said.

J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) told Breitbart News that the vetoing of the legislation by Cooper ahead of the 2020 presidential election is setting “a dangerous precedent for North Carolina and any other state with higher numbers of legal immigrants passing through their government systems.”

“Non-citizens most often become registered to vote by mistake when they fill out an application for a service, like a driver’s license,” Adams continued. “Instead of adopting a simple procedure to catch those errors, Gov. Cooper bowed to the radical left’s desire to keep non-citizen voter participation an unspeakable matter. Legitimate votes in North Carolina will continue to be canceled and otherwise good people will risk deportation because of his veto. This is truly a backward decision from the governor.”

In June, PILF filed a lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections for failing to make public the number of non-citizens who are on state voter rolls. Last year, a PILF study revealed that non-citizens on voter rolls in sanctuary cities like San Diego County, California were vastly more likely to register as Democrats rather than Republicans.

The U.S. is on track to import about 15 million foreign-born voters by the year 2038 should the country’s current legal immigration system go unreformed. That is nearly quadruple the size of the annual number of U.S. births: about four million American babies are born every year.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.