There is a history of states for syncing & auditing purposes, but only the current state of the ledger is referenced when appending/voting on new transactions.
If you are syncing from a historic point, say if you were offline, then your node would request the state actions you are missing, and action them to get to the same state as everyone else.
So there is a chain of history? Which is it, I'm confused?
Ok, so assuming there is a chain, and I am a syncing node just joining the network for the first time AND I am presented with two different chain histories, how do I know which one to pick?