Police raided the largest voter registration drive in the state with the lowest voter turnout in the country.

INDIANA, HARDLY a bastion of bleeding-heart liberalism, became on Wednesday the latest state to curb the use in prisons of solitary confinement, an extreme, hellish and overused punishment. It follows President Obama, who on Monday announced reforms to prisoner isolation practices in federal prisons, and it joins California and New York as one of the latest states to submit to a legal settlement requiring changes. Indiana’s move is another sign of progress in ending a national scandal: the routine overuse of a practice that is akin to torture. But it took a class-action lawsuit to prompt the decision, and even then it promises insufficient change.

The last round of voter restrictions came after the 2010 Republican wave, when new GOP majorities passed voter identification laws and slashed ballot access in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. Now, three months after the 2014 Republican wave, another class of state lawmakers are prepping another assault on voting rights under the same guise of “uniformity” and “ballot integrity.”

Seen from a purely political vantage, this hasn’t been the greatest week for Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who is often mentioned as a potential dark horse for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. For one thing, the 2016 aspirant whose profile most closely resembles Pence’s, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, is riding a boomlet following his strong performance at a conservative cattle call in Iowa last weekend.