She wanted to run for State Representative in an area she didn't happen to live in. The law says you have to live in your district to run. She committed fraud in order to fake residency. It wasn't about stealing an election but it's still fraud.
If this is as minor as you claim it is, I wonder why she would even be charged in the first place, considering how so many more serious cases of voting fraud and cheating go undetected and unprosecuted around the country.
I'm not sure - you'd have to ask the prosecutors. But I'm also not sure that I agree that it's minor. Her mother is an elections official, so even while the underlying issue -- whether or not she lives in her district -- seems pretty minor, it's a big deal that a candidate for office and an elections official might conspire to corrupt the voter registration process.
OK, now it's starting to make some sense. The law says you must live in the district from which you seek election. She eyes a district she doesn't live in, probably because any Democrat in that district with a Hispanic surname is virtually a shoo-in. But she doesn't want to move into that district, probably because of the extensive poverty and crime, etc., there. So she gets a phony address in that district to superficially conform to the law, then runs there, and gets elected with close to 90% of the vote.
Now you have at least one illegal vote in the district for her: her own. But how many other friends of hers could have been part of this and done exactly the same thing, perhaps registering at multiple locations in the district, perhaps with the aid of her mother, an election official? You see, this kind of scheme can result in just about as many illegal votes for your candidate as you're capable of ginning up.