FLORIDA — Manual recounts started Friday in closely-contested Florida's U.S. Senate and Commissioner of Agriculture races, and in some counties the effort will continue into Saturday morning.

One of those counties is Palm Beach County, where officials wrapped up at about 5 p.m. and said they would reconvene at 8 a.m.

Sen. Bill Nelson's re-election campaign has been optimistic that tens of thousands of undervotes — ballots where machines didn't pick up a vote — would show a vote for him when counted by hand.

But Spectrum News Capital Reporter Troy Kinsey said that for the most part, that hasn't been the case.

Instead, election workers are finding a lot of people really did skip the Senate race altogether.

About 93,000 ballots are being counted by hand in the races for senate and agriculture commissioner. After a machine recount, there were 12,603 votes that separate Gov. Rick Scott and the incumbent Democrat Nelson. That is a .15 percent difference.

The ballots are either registered as overvotes — selecting more than one candidate in any given race or undervotes, with no candidate having been chosen.

In heavily Democratic Broward and Miami-Dade counties, the hand counting is already over, with officials finding all but a few hundred voters really did leave the Senate race blank.

Democrats complain a poor ballot design in Broward County kept many voters from finding the race. Others say the choice between the two candidates was far from inspiring.

But whatever the case, the manual count Nelson had hoped would turn the tide in his favor is prompting Scott to call for the senator's concession.

That's even though Scott is on record saying the vote counting in south Florida has been suspect.

The official results from all the vote counting, including the hand recount, are due Sunday at noon here at the Division of Elections in Tallahassee.

In the meantime, Democrats are working one more angle, contacting thousands of voters whose mail-in ballots have been rejected and urging them to clear things up with their local elections office by 5 p.m. Saturday.

The recount has been fraught with problems. One large Democratic stronghold in South Florida was unable to finish its machine recount by the Thursday deadline due to machines breaking down. A federal judge rejected a request to extend the recount deadline.

Meanwhile, election officials in another urban county in the Tampa Bay area decided against turning in the results of their machine recount, which came up with 846 fewer votes than originally counted. Media in South Florida reported that Broward County finished its machine recount but missed the deadline by a few minutes.

On Thursday night, a judge ruled Florida's voter intent laws are constitutional, despite a challenge from Democrats.

According to the Associated Press, Republican Ron DeSantis will be Florida's next governor.

Andrew Gillum, who conceded on Election Night only to retract his concession later, told the AP that, "It is not over until ever legally casted vote is counted."

Spectrum News Reporter Jerry Hume and The Associated Press contributed to this story.