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Guilford County, like North Carolina as a whole, set an all-time record for the number of ballots cast during early voting despite GOP efforts for suppress voter turnout.

Monday night, Hillary Clinton butchered Reconstruction's history. It's a good opportunity to correct the record, and glean why Lincoln really was America's greatest president. Reconstruction in reality was a briefly successful attempt to build a true democracy in the South. Clinton implies that it was Southern anger at unjust Reconstruction policy that led them to institute Jim Crow, but Jim Crow was the goal from the very end of the war.

When we were founded as a nation, a fierce political battle erupted over who would have the vote. It was a fight over who was included in "We the People." We have been fighting that political war ever since, and continue to fight it to this day. The issue of who has the vote continues to be a fight because those who are well-served by the status-quo want to limit the voting power of those who they fear have good reason to be dissatisfied with the way things are.

This weekend, thousands of people -- including one-fifth of the U.S. Congress and President Obama -- are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the famous Selma to Montgomery march. The irony is rich: The 1965 Selma march -- and the violent "Bloody Sunday" caused by Alabama troopers -- is credited with speeding passage of the Voting Rights Act, Yet voting rights in the South and the Voting Rights Act itself are in their most precarious position in half a century.

A Republican-controlled computer system allegedly meant to identify fraudulent voters, may have contributed to GOP victories in Senate races in Colorado and North Carolina, and a tight gubernatorial race in Kansas. While Interstate Crosscheck has not discovered a single instance of voter fraud, it was used by Republican elections officials in 27 states to purge thousands of voters, a high percentage of whom were minorities, from the voting rolls.

These efforts to curb young and minority voters come as youth -- and especially minority youth -- are becoming increasingly larger parts of the American electorate. Voters between 18 and 29 years old were critical to President Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012. In North Carolina in 2008, the only age group of which a majority voted for Obama was voters aged 18 to 29, according to CNN. Obama won the state by just 14,177 votes.

A new study, titled "Jim Crow 2.0? Why States Consider and Adopt Restrictive Voter Access Policies," concludes that restrictive voter measures are connected to both partisan and racial factors.