Pull Down Values on IMPORT

Does anyone know how to control the values of a pull down field on IMPORT when the input value does not match anything in the drop down list?
I have a drop down list for STATE and it has all 50 States plus one value called “blank” which is also the default.

When I import a file to this module if one of the values in the State column of the file does not match any drop down value it seems to take something other than the default.

Any ideas?

Have you tried handling this directly from the database? Use phpmyadmin or MySQL to access the table and see what is there (maybe NULL’s?) and change it.