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The court’s unanimous decision, interpreted as a victory for Texas Republicans, extended the uncertainty surrounding this major voting-rights case, one that could play a role in determining control of the House of Representatives.

“A district court should take guidance from the state’s recently enacted plan in drafting an interim plan,” the Supreme Court’s unsigned decision said. “That plan reflects the state’s policy judgments on where to place new districts and how to shift existing ones in response to massive population growth.”

Justice Clarence Thomas concurred only in the result and said he would have instructed the elections to proceed under the Legislature’s maps.

In a second development on Friday, the justices blocked a decision of a federal court in West Virginia in another election case while the justices consider an appeal. The West Virginia case concerns whether that state’s three House districts must be absolutely equal in population.

In the Texas case, the justices acted just 11 days after hearing arguments. Primaries in Texas had already been moved back to April. For those primaries to proceed, officials there said, an answer from the courts was needed by Feb. 1.

“This is a big win for Texas, and will require the drawing of districts much more likely to favor Texas’s interim plan,” Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, said in an e-mail. The new maps, Professor Hasen said, would “favor Republicans over Democrats” as compared with the lower court’s original maps.

Much of the language in the Supreme Court’s opinion was conditional, and its criticism of the lower court was mostly indirect.

“To the extent the district court exceeded its mission to draw interim maps that do not violate the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act, and substituted its own concept of ‘the collective public good’ for the Texas Legislature’s determination of which policies serve ‘the interests of the citizens of Texas,’ the court erred,” the opinion said, quoting from the lower court’s ruling.

But the message and music of the opinion was that significantly more weight should have been given to the Legislature’s maps.

The two competing sets of maps set out the borders of election districts in Texas for the State Legislature and the United States House of Representatives on the basis of the most recent 10-year census.

The changes to the electoral maps were required because Texas grew by more than four million people in the last decade, with about 65 percent of that growth coming in the Hispanic population. The growth entitled the state to four additional House seats.

The maps drawn by the Legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, seemed to favor Republican candidates. The ones drawn by the lower court, a special three-judge federal court in San Antonio, increased the voting power of Hispanic voters and seemed to help Democratic candidates. Democrats need a net gain of 25 seats to take back the House from Republican control and both parties are fighting for every advantage in the battle for the House majority.

Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, changes in voting procedures in states with a history of discrimination cannot take effect until they have been approved by either the Justice Department or a special three-judge court in Washington.