Section 5.1 of the Rules of the Election Commission states: "If a voter does not vote Yes or No to a question to re-open nominations for a given office, their vote for that office will not be counted."
Therefore, the vote will not be counted.
Yes, I would. Bolding one of the options does count as selecting one of the choices.
In the situation that you described, the votes for the second-choice candidate will be distributed based on the voters' third-choice preference.
If the voter only ranked two candidates, their vote will be allocated to their second-choice candidate, regardless of whether or not that candidate is tied with another candidate. In this case, the tie between the second-choice candidate and the other candidate would be broken based on the allocation of votes from other voters who ranked those candidates.
Section 5.4 of the Rules of the Election Commission states: "If a voter selects fewer candidates for a given office than are allowed, their unused selections will be treated as abstentions, and their votes for that office will be counted."
Therefore, their vote would be counted. The voter in your scenario selected only one candidate in a ranked election. Since they didn't use all their selections, their remaining votes would be considered abstentions.