The polls close at 7 p.m. across Virginia tonight, although people still on line may be casting ballots after that. Antonio Olivo and Lenny Bronner of the Washington Post explain why we may see a large lead for Terry McAuliffe once the first returns begin to come in:

Most election officials will begin posting the tallies for absentee ballot tallies first, most likely shortly after polls close at 7 p.m. That is largely due to a law passed by the General Assembly this year that requires election officials to begin preprocessing absentee ballots — or confirming their validity and then scanning them into a voting machine — at least seven days before Election Day. Last year, election officials didn’t begin processing the bulk of their absentee ballots until after polls closed, resulting in long delays in reporting those results. As a result, the first ballots counted were in-person votes cast on Election Day — only 40 percent of all votes cast — which favored Trump…As a result, McAuliffe might have a lead early in the night. Youngkin could catch-up in the vote count once localities start counting Election Day ballots because generally Republican-friendly rural localities tend to count day-of ballots faster than urban ones. Whether Youngkin is able to maintain his lead will depend on how many Election Day votes McAuliffe will have outstanding in the urban localities . . .