PGC determines the county itself on the basis of the map data it has for the country in question. Usually this comes from OpenStreetMap. If a cache appears to be in the wrong county this can basically have two reasons:
1) The co-ordinates of the cache are wrong. This is relevant mainly close to the border of two counties. Often, e.g., the border runs along a road. If the co-ordinates point to one side of the road but the cache actually is on the other, then, of course, PGC lists it in the "wrong" country. The solution here is to contact the CO to correct the co-ordinates. Once that is done, the county of the cache is also automatically corrected on PGC.
A special case are cache types like mysteries, multis etc. where the final can be in a different administrative unit than the header. Of course, in these cases the header co-ordinates are what counts. Because of this, a cache can appear to be in the "wrong" county, but this is not the case. Only the header co-ordinates count. If you feel that this gives a particularily illogical attribution, you could talk to the CO. Maybe he is willing to move the header co-ordinates so that they are then situated in the same county as the final.
(Note that this is true for region and county level only. While PGC luckily ignores the CO’s interpretion of the region the cache is in, Interestingly enough PGC does "believe" the CO when it comes to the country, even if this is manifestly wrong (or just a few metres on the other side of the border). It would be great if PGC could also use map data on the country level.)
2) Sometimes the borders on OpenStreetMap are wrong. If you are confident that this is the case – check with official sources like cadastre data, government websites etc. – then you can correct the border on OpenStreetMap, if you are familiar with mapping work on OSM. (Otherwise you might try to find someone who is.) In this, case, however, the attribution of the cache will not change on PGC immediately but only once they update the polygons for the country in question. This is apparently done quite infrequently, so the cache might still be listed under the wrong county for quite some time. (I sometimes correct the county (=municipal) borders on OSM for Belgium – mostly it's a question of a few meters left or right, which makes the difference. Once I have detected a number of such inaccuracies and corrected them, I ask the friendly people on PGC to update the Belgian polygon, and from then on the caches are in the right county.)
Hope that helps.
Do you have a specific cache you feel is in the wrong county?
