How does the STATE abbreviations come up it's driving me nuts.

i upload all my orders with an add on for canada post EST but i noticed that it doesn't upload abbreviated states or provinces. now it's driving me nuts cause i have to manually input those orders into the system.

what i'm asking is why i i even see this in the first place, does zencart randomly abbreviate some addresses and not others which makes no sense, the only reason i say this i because 8 out of 10 times all the clients Customer Address info is perfect then the billing and shipping addresses are abrivianted. And is there a simple way from admin to prevent this as i don't want to have to manually input another shipment if i have to.

i just went into configuration/ minimum values and changed the state values from 2 to 4. Hopefully this will solve my problems as it should prevent people from abbreviating their province and state names for shipping.