PHOENIX — Arizona’s redistricting process is months behind schedule with no end in sight, creating headaches for elections officials and uncertainty for potential candidates while setting the stage for possible election-year scrambles to put interim lines and other processes in place for 2012 deadlines.

“Everything is up in the air,” said Kris Kingsmore, state assistant elections director.

For candidates, the delay in approving new maps means incumbents and would-be officeholders alike can’t yet assess their prospects in political landscapes yet to be drawn.

“You just put your life on hold,” said state Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Phoenix Democrat considering a run for a Congress.

Even before the political battle stemming from the court-overturned attempt by Gov. Jan Brewer to remove redistricting commission chairwoman Colleen Mathis, the five-member panel’s pace was well behind an Oct. 1 target date set by county election officials for the state to approve new congressional and legislative districts.

The commission plans to resume mapping work in the coming week after 30 public hearings in October on its draft maps and then a pause for most of November over Mathis, who has said she hopes final maps are approved by Christmas. Even then, the commission has to submit them to federal voting-rights enforcers for review. That could take months.

And whether maps eventually approved by the commission even get used in 2012 is in question, because lawsuits challenging their constitutionality could throw the map-drawing process temporarily into court.

Democrats and others filed lawsuits challenging the maps approved a decade ago. The commission-approved congressional map was used in 2002, but a three-judge federal panel ordered that an interim legislative map be used that year after Hispanics objected to the original.

The maps from last decade are now considered unconstitutional because of population changes. And the congressional map doesn’t include the ninth U.S. House seat that Arizona was awarded after the 2010 Census.

Karen Osborn, Maricopa County elections director, told the newly appointed redistricting commissioners in February that counties needed to have the state’s maps to avoid conflict with voting precincts. Those are basic building blocks in how elections are conducted.

Counties must submit their new precinct maps to voter-rights enforcers by Dec. 1. Osborn said her county is on track to do that, but some precincts might have to be redrawn in months ahead to fit whatever maps that state eventually approves

“That’s cutting it close, but we can’t wait,” Osborn said of asking county supervisors to approve new precincts on Nov. 30. At this point, if the county waited for the redistricting commission to finish, “it would be physically impossible to have an election next year,” she said.

Other deadlines and start dates loom.

Counties must provide the state with each legislative and congressional district’s voter tallies by March 1 so calculations can be made on how many voter signatures candidates must collect to qualify for the ballot. It’s also when counties must tell voters their precincts. Qualifying periods for candidates for public funding and getting on ballots begin in January and May, respectively.

On a practical level, redistricting can have a big impact on a politician’s decision to run for a particular office. It’s good if a district has a candidate’s hometown. But what if potential rival’s base of support dominates a new district?

Sinema said the unknowns about redistricting make it hard to assess fundraising opportunities and other calculations.

Depending on where U.S. House district lines are drawn through central Phoenix, she could be in a district with a Democratic incumbent, one with roughly even margins between the parties and maybe no incumbent, and one dominated by Republicans, possibly with an incumbent.

“Viability is dependent on redistricting,” Sinema said. “It seems prudent and reasonable to us to wait until the commission has done its job.”