As the others said, you should use a Boolean value as the second parameter to CheckBox to indicate the checked status. A bit of string manipulation should help you get the ids of the selected check boxes..
First lets change the way the checkbox helper is used
<div id='myCheckboxDiv'>
@foreach (var item in Model.GetRoleNames)
{
@Html.CheckBox("chk_" + item.Value, false)@item.Text<br />
}
</div>
As you can see, I have set the second parameter to false and wrapped the mix in a div
And, when you want to get the ‘values’ associated with the selected checkboxes
var values = $(‘# myCheckboxDiv’).find('input:checkbox:checked').map(function () {
// get the name ..
var nameOfSelectedItem = this.attr('name');
// skip the ‘chk_’ part and give me the rest
return nameOfSelectedItem.substr(4);
}).get();
I am assuming item.Value to be a number. If its is not, please remove the white spaces using C#