Boston Democrat Marty Walz, who easily won a local race for state representative yesterday, flagrantly violated Massachusetts election law by campaigning just steps away from a Copley Square polling station, according to Harvard Law School (HLS) students who volunteered as voting monitors.

Walz ignored warnings from election watchers and police officers, who told the candidate that state law prohibits campaigning within 150 feet of a polling station, student volunteers said.

According to students, Walz told monitors: “You’re obviously new to the area and you obviously don’t understand the way we do things here.”

Supporters of Walz’s rival, Republican Richard L. Babson, also illegally campaigned near the polling station, volunteer Matthew E. Swanson ’02 said.

Walz will represent the 8th Suffolk District, which includes Cambridgeport and MIT, as well as the Boston neighborhoods of Back Bay, Beacon Hill and West End.

At first, Walz told the volunteers that they “had no authority,” said Swanson, a second-year HLS student.

After election monitors from Harvard brought Boston police officers to the scene, Walz still refused to budge, Swanson said.

Swanson was one of 100 Harvard students dispatched to local polling stations by Just Democracy, a voting rights group founded earlier this year by two current HLS students.

William D. Rahm, a joint JD/MBA student who is president of Just Democracy’s Harvard chapter, said he was surprised that Walz “so brazenly flouted the law in her campaigning for a legal position.”

Walz, a former attorney and longtime community activist, earned a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2000.

Her opponent Babson, a millionaire economist, has made headlines for bucking the Republican Party line on gay marriage. Babson, who is himself openly gay, has vigorously defended same sex couples’ right to wed.

Walz and Babson did not return repeated requests for comment last night.

SCATTERED VIOLATIONS

While Harvard volunteers fanned out to nearby polling stations, Just Democracy mobilized nearly 2,000 volunteers from law schools nationwide to staff polling stations, monitor election abuses and assist voters.

Phones rang off the hook at Just Democracy’s office on the first floor of Gannet House yesterday afternoon, as volunteers in more than two dozen states reported scattered election problems.