State and county elections officials are scrambling to put together a system to accommodate new requirements for qualifying constitutional ballot proposals.

County clerks and the secretary of state’s office feels a sense of urgency to implement the Raise the Bar initiative, pointing out that proponents already are organizing ballot questions for the 2018 election cycle.

Amendment 71, adopted by the state’s voters on Nov. 8, makes it more difficult to amend the state constitution.

It will take signatures from all 35 state Senate districts to make the ballot. Of the total required signatures, the number collected from each district would need to equal at least 2 percent of the registered voters in those districts to make the ballot.

It currently takes 98,492 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.

Proposed constitutional amendments making the ballot would then need 55 percent of the vote to pass on Election Day, rather than a simple majority.

Existing provisions in the constitution could be repealed by a simple majority under the Raise the Bar directive.

The ballot question did not alter the statutory ballot-initiative process. Statutory ballot questions are easier to amend because language is not locked into the state constitution.

Meeting Thursday, the bipartisan Election Advisory Committee discussed the complicated nature of implementing the new requirements.

“Regardless of where you collect the petition signatures, there is no guarantee that people live in that area,” explained Secretary of State Wayne Williams, a Republican. “And if you’re in the metro area, who knows what Senate district the King Soopers is in that you go to. You may have crossed a Senate district line.”

Williams was referring to the fact that petition gatherers often collect signatures at supermarkets in local communities.

Proponents argue that the new requirements will help engage rural Colorado. Most signatures currently come from heavily populated urban areas of the state, like Denver, where petition gatherers can collect large chunks of signatures quickly, and relatively easily, if they have the money to pay circulators. The initiative forces proponents to consider the entire state.

Critics of the proposal-largely led by special-interest groups-argued that the measure will have a chilling effect on the democratic process.

On Thursday, Elena Nunez, executive director of Colorado Common Cause, raised concerns with how the petition format will look, and how the secretary of state’s office will go about validating signatures.

State elections officials acknowledged that they still have to figure out the process, and that additional information may be required on the petition form.

“We definitely have thought about how can we get folks to organize their petitions in a manner that we can actually see that they’ve collected signature from all 35 Senate districts,” said Ben Schler, manager of internal operations for the state’s Elections Division.

Given the confusion over what Senate district a voter might reside in, one idea on the table includes requiring petition circulators to look up each individual’s district when signing a form. But that could be a burden and complicated.

In many cases, circulators will have to rely on voters to state what district they live in, and many may not know.

Another idea is to provide circulators with district maps, but that could be time consuming and confusing, as there would be many maps that can be difficult to read.

“I’d like to figure out a way to do it, I just can’t come up with a way,” Williams said. “That’s why we’re stuck on the backend.”