I have tested your indices hypothesis and sadly it fails. I think that NS just has two completely separate lists of countries!

cja: If you use a custom field for states, there is no way that I have found to get the abbreviation of the State, e.g. 'CA' for 'California'. In the end what I did is I created an object in this format: {<state_name>:<state_abbreviation>}

Thanks. My issue is with countries though

I believe the same thing applies to countries