(CNN) A federal judge in Florida has ruled voters whose mismatched signatures disqualified their provisional and mail-in ballots and who were "belatedly notified" of the problem have until Saturday at 5 p.m. to correct those signature problems.

The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker comes in a suit brought by U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson's campaign and Democratic Party officials, who are looking to the courts to help them find votes to narrow the margin in Nelson's bid for re-election against Republican challenger Gov. Rick Scott . The number of ballots in question is certainly less than the margin of votes separating Nelson and Scott. Scott led Nelson in the unofficial, pre-recount tally by more than 12,500 votes.

In his ruling Judge Walker said as many as 5,000 ballots could be impacted by the signature mismatch provision, however, it is unclear exactly how many votes were impacted by this decision.

In court, Democratic lawyers introduced examples of voters who were informed of the signature mismatch issue, but that notification came after the deadline to resolve the problem. Walker's ruling only offers relief to those voters who were "belatedly notified.

The ruling is narrower than the wider relief that Democrats were seeking, which was to invalidate the signature-match requirement entirely. Florida law requires signatures on vote-by-mail and provisional ballots match the signatures on file for each voter. Attorneys for Nelson's re-election campaign argued that the signature-match rules violate the US Constitution and called for the judge to invalidate the law. Lawyers representing the state of Florida and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, along with others, argued that the law was valid and constitutional.

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