Even if a new state Board of Elections orders a new election in North Carolina’s disputed 9^th Congressional District, it could be months before it’s held.

That would leave the district’s constituents without representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. The process seating a representative in the district got even more confused in recent days.

The district includes parts or whole counties of Mecklenburg, Anson, Union, Richmond, Scotland, Robeson, Bladen and Cumberland counties.

A planned Jan. 11 hearing by the state elections board won’t occur, after a three-judge federal panel declared the nine-member state board unconstitutional and dissolved it last month. Republican Mark Harris filed a lawsuit Thursday asking a Wake County judge to force the state elections board to declare him the winner. Harris held about a 900-vote lead against Democratic challenger Dan McCready in unofficial results in a race that includes an alleged scheme involving absentee ballots in Bladen County.

That allegation is that Harris staffer Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr. conducted an illegal absentee ballot-harvesting operation in two counties in the state with the intention of swinging the absentee ballot vote in Harris’s favor.

Staff members with the state Board of Elections are continuing their investigation.

Meanwhile, Congress and the courts could order a new election, according to state elections officials. There is also a provision, in some cases, that the governor — under state law — could order a new congressional contest.

In the lawsuit filed Thursday, Harris contended the court’s dissolving of the state board could mean a long delay.

“There will be no state board authorized by statute to certify the results of the November 2018 election for many weeks,” Harris’s attorneys wrote.

Before the dissolution of the state board, the North Carolina Republican Party urged it to certify the results.

“We believe that, again, that I should be certified,” Harris said Thursday after his meeting with state board investigators. “We don’t believe that the number of ballots in question would change the outcome of this election.”