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A lengthy delay in reporting census figures to the states could throw a wrench into at least some states’ efforts to draw new political maps. Most states have fixed deadlines for approving new maps, some of them written into state constitutions, that could prove hard or impossible to meet if population figures are delayed into the summer, according to Jeffrey M. Wice, a redistricting expert and senior fellow at New York Law School.

“This could open a can of worms depending on the policies of the states,” he said. “It’s not inconceivable that some states might use administrative records to redistrict instead of the decennial census count,” a change that could have a substantial political impact depending on the data used.

The Constitution requires states to use census data for apportioning political districts — in other words, to ensure that districts like House seats are roughly equal in population. But courts have left the door open for states to use different population figures to actually draw maps in some circumstances. Republicans in some states have expressed interest in basing maps on population counts that exclude noncitizens or are limited to registered voters, formulas that would give minorities and other Democratic-leaning groups less political representation.

Census officials have said that response to the census — the first to be conducted largely over the internet — had been meeting expectations. But the bureau already had been forced once to extend the shutdown of field operations that it first announced in March. Efforts to count millions of households in specialized segments of the population — homeless people and those without fixed addresses, such as Native Americans on reservations — have been in limbo, awaiting the bureau’s decision when it would be safe to begin or resume them.

As of Monday, 48.1 percent of households had filled out census forms, with well over a month remaining in the formal period for responding. In the last census in 2010, 66.5 percent of households filled out forms; most of the rest were contacted by an army of door-knockers, called enumerators, who started work after the formal deadline for responding had passed.

This year, the door-knocking was scheduled to begin in mid-May, then postponed to late May. The bureau said Monday only that this count and other field operations would begin “as quickly as possible” after June 1, and last until Oct. 31.

A vast array of businesses, nonprofit groups and state and local governments have huge stakes in the census, which sets the benchmark for the next decade’s allocation of federal grants and subsidies, for marketing and planning studies that shape entire cities and, of course, for political representation.