He said he doesn't know how the fight in North Carolina will affect Diebold's status there.

Critics of Diebold are chalking up the latest ruling as a win. "We think this is a great victory for North Carolina voters," said Matthew Zimmerman, staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit civil rights advocacy group. The EFF was among the parties opposing Diebold in court.

"It sends a clear message to the rest of the country that the laws designed to increase integrity and transparency are valid and don't prevent a state from being able to go forward with e-voting systems," Zimmerman said, adding that other e-voting vendors, such as Election Systems & Software Inc., have complied with North Carolina's laws. "It (the third-party software issue) was a completely artificial argument in the first place," he said.