Is CiviDiscount supposed to work with Checksum?

I'm testing a freshly installed copy of 4.4.4 and CiviDiscount 2.5 and early bird pricing. (although the behavior appears to be the same without early bird pricing) I'm using checksum tokens to direct contacts to an event registration page where a Discount should apply to members.

The Discount applies to Contact X when they are logged in already and visit the event reg page. The discount does NOT apply when Contact X is NOT logged in and arrives at the event reg page via checksum link, although it does recognize them as a contact.

Is this by design or is it a bug?