Getting the Array listed in a drop down menu

I'm looking to do some coding that looks at the array that has been pushed into a drop down menu.  I was looking at the code and couldn't figure out if there was a function to pull that information back out.  For instance if I had a drop down list that was populated ([1, Dave], [2, Jack], [3, Jane]) I wanted to grab that array list, identify the option with the highest value, 3 in this case, and then select 3 in the drop down menu.

The use case would be on a task creation that would chose the newest quote for a given customer on pageInit.  I'm hoping that the system will have already populated the transaction information into the transaction drop down since the customer is already specified.  I figure I can also do this with a search but since all the data is already there, I'd rather not waste any scripting units.