A Twitter account misleading Democratic voters in Virginia by telling them they could cast their ballot by text message was active for almost three hours on Tuesday morning before Twitter suspended the account.

The account, "MAGA Mike King," was suspended after it tweeted more than a dozen times a graphic purportedly instructing Virginians on how to vote by text and including the logos of the Democratic Party and its gubernatorial candidate, Ralph Northam.

The account doesn't appear to have had much success spreading its message, with less than a handful of interactions on each of the offending tweets, but to some observers that's almost beside the point. Their concern is that the account remained active for almost three hours out of the 13 hours that polls are open in Virginia, despite the fact that Twitter knows these sorts of efforts are a potential problem on its platform, and has claimed success in fighting back against them.

Tim Chambers, the founder of Discourse Intelligence, and co-founder of Dewey Square, a consultancy firm that traditionally works with Democratic causes, reported the account "MAGA Mike King" account to Twitter at 9 a.m. Tuesday morning, more than an hour before it was taken down, he told CNN.
"Ideally this would be something that Twitter would be catching very early and that it wouldn't take people like myself to spot and them reacting later," he said.

Ralph Northam won in Virginia thanks in large part to women. He leads women by a broad 19 percentage points in Virginia, according to early exit polls.

What it means: That's essentially the same as Hillary Clinton's lead of 17 points among women when she won the state by 6 percentage points last November. It's up from Sen. Mark Warner's lead of 12 points in 2014 and Gov. Terry McAuliffe's lead of 9 points in 2013. Northam's margins are higher than Clinton's among subsets of women, like white college-educated women -- where he doubled her lead, 6 points vs. 12 points.