Tierney Sneed for TPM:

Virginia’s State Board of Elections is asking the court weighing a voting rights case being brought in the state to exclude any evidence of the state’s history of racial discrimination.

The board filed a motion Monday to “exclude expert testimony and other evidence of Virginia’s history of racial discrimination,” particularly anything that happened before 1965, when the federal Voting Rights Act was passed….

“Recent Supreme Court decisions warn against reliance upon non-contemporaneous history, on the grounds that such history is not probative in a challenge to a more recent legislative action,” the motion said.

However, according to UC-Irvine School of Law professor Rick Hasen, who runs Election Law blog, the Shelby County did not rule out the consideration of a state’s discriminatory history outright.

“Shelby County tells us obviously you can’t make decisions just based on the past, but it doesn’t make it irrelevant for the purpose of figuring things out,” Hasen told TPM.

Indeed, when Congress amended Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary issued a report with it outlining the factors that should be taken into account when assessing possible violations, including “the history of official voting-related discrimination in the state or political subdivision.”