Gary O. Bartlett, the executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, Friday confirmed that Allen, Texas-based Diebold notified his agency this week that it was pulling out of the running to sell its e-voting systems to the state. Reached at his home in Goldsboro, N.C., Bartlett said he was on vacation for the holidays and declined further comment. A Diebold spokesman said his company withdrew because a new state law was too difficult to adhere to.

Another vendor, Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. in Oakland, Calif., was dropped from the state certification process after it was unable to obtain a required federal system certification, said spokeswoman Michelle Shafer. The company wanted to remain in the running while it attempted to get federal certification, but the state election board declined the offer, she said.

Only one company, Election Systems & Software Inc. in Omaha, remains as an e-voting systems vendor in North Carolina as part of a certification process that began earlier this year.

The withdrawals of Diebold and Sequoia come a few weeks after the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a national digital rights advocacy group, filed a lawsuit against the North Carolina board of elections, alleging that the agency had certified e-voting systems from the three vendors on Dec. 1 before performing "nondiscretionary source code integrity reviews prior to granting certification."

The EFF complaint was also filed on behalf of Winston-Salem, N.C., resident Joyce McCloy, who has been an e-voting activist in the state for the past several years and is the founder of the North Carolina Coalition for Verified Voting.