In a victory for government transparency, Harris County officials settled a lawsuit Tuesday with a conservative voting rights group, agreeing to disclose records of foreign nationals who voted in Texas elections and records documenting their attempts to register.

The Indianapolis-based Public Interest Legal Foundation behind the lawsuit is headed by J. Christian Adams, a voting-fraud crusader. He served in the Justice Department during the administration of President George W. Bush and was later tapped to serve on the Trump administration’s election integrity commission, which set out to clean up voting rolls around the country and prevent non-citizens from casting ballots.

Critics said his organization was hunting for a problem that didn’t exist, targeting low-income, left-leaning localities with a string of lawsuits that sought personal documents related to voters.

Adams characterized the agreement as “the best possible outcome for clean elections in Texas” and said his group intends to use the data to catalog and provide stakeholders with information on problems that allow foreigners to get on voter rolls.

Adams’ group PILF targeted Harris County in a March 2018 voting-rights lawsuit based on testimony from former voter registrar Mike Sullivan, a Republican, before the Texas House of Representatives alleging that for nearly two decades, officials had refused to comply with the federal law mandating inspection. The group’s presumption, according to internal briefs, was “not if, but how many aliens are getting onto Texas rolls, and voting?”

As PILF’s general counsel, Adams participated in the negotiated settlement with the county’s Democratic voter registrar, Ann Harris Bennett, in which the county agreed to provide records of people taken off the voter roll due to ineligibility and names of those who received “notices of examination” where their eligibility was questioned by election officials. The county also agreed to provide records dating back to 2013, including copies of voter registration applications with blank or negative responses to questions about their citizenship.

The county also said it would provide lists of registrants who were stricken from rolls after they were disqualified from jury service due to their non-citizenship as well as all communications between the registrar’s office and law-enforcement entities regarding registrants who were ineligible to vote.

It turned out that over the seven year period the county examined 998 voter registrations were challenged or disallowed based on citizenship, according to Douglas Ray, a special assistant at the Harris County Attorney’s Office. Just under 10 percent of that total successfully countered the challenge about their citizenship status.

What the county refused to provide were responses to jury summons from people who said they weren’t citizens. Instead, the county would provide the conclusions of its own findings about who shouldn’t be on the rolls.

“Our election systems must be transparent. Foreigners are registering and voting in the United States,” Adams said in a statement. “Election officials must be transparent and follow federal disclosure laws if we are ever to understand the extent of the problem.”

Attorney Ray, who represented the county, objected to providing social security numbers and phone numbers saying that level of disclosure violated state law.

The county agreed to provide voter registrations for individuals it had challenged on basis of citizenship without disclosing how it arrived at that conclusion.

“We’re providing to them all the voter registrations of every person whose registration was successfully challenged on the basis,” Ray said.

“They wanted us to give unredacted versions of every file that’s been given to us on this person. We felt like there’s certain information that they’re not entitled to and we didn’t want to unredact it,” Ray said.

The foundation has filed similar lawsuits in other places like Pennsylvania and has targeted other areas like Bexar County and the state of New Jersey. Bexar County, according to Ray, handed over the information without any negotiation.

That was too great a compromise, Ray said, because Harris County has about 18 percent of the registered voters in Texas.

gabrielle.banks@chron.com