It seems perfectly reasonable to not count votes that are unclear. It's not a complex procedure to fill in a circle on a scantron, if you can't follow the directions, then too bad for you and your vote and your preferred candidates.

Yes, the US has been able to screw up even paper elections in an attempt to make counting supposedly faster. Most other countries just use a paper ballot with some squares next to the candidates and you mark with an X. Any deviation from that is a null vote because the voter could try to identify himself otherwise. Our elections run smoothly every time and we have well counted results in a few hours at most, faster than the US is ever able to accomplish from what I've seen.

Which country is this?

I'm in Portugal. Most of Europe is the same, Canada too.

Doesn't Portugal have widespread corruption, especially in regards to political parties and parliament?

Perception of corruption is about on par with the US in the studies I've seen. That's mostly unrelated to quality of the election process though. There the US is quite a long way back. The Bush/Gore mess would never happen here.