WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — When iconic Dodge City, once the home to Wild West gunslingers and buffalo hunters, faced a lawsuit before the midterm elections for moving its sole polling place outside city limits, its top elections official turned to a hired legal gun to battle charges of voter suppression.

Ford County Clerk Debbie Cox hired Bradley Schlozman, who is little-known outside the legal community but well-known for defending states and towns accused of trying to restrict voting.

“I sort of liken it to someone who is accused of arson showing up at the trial with kerosene and matches,” Micah Kubic, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, said of the hiring of Schlozman.

Schlozman was a top lawyer in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in the George W. Bush administration who has been involved in some of the thorniest voting issues of the last two decades.

At the Justice Department, Schlozman in 2005 backed Georgia, among the first states to enact a voter ID law, overruling the department’s career attorneys who had argued it would reduce voting by minorities. After a court struck it down as an unconstitutional poll tax because it required voters to pay for IDs, lawmakers revised it in 2006 to make it easier to get IDs for free.