Welcome to CNN 10 on this December 15th.

Across the United States, votes were cast yesterday in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

But Carl, you might be asking, didn't that happen on November 3rd?

Yes! But Americans do not directly choose their president.

They choose electors, members of the Electoral College who cast the final votes for president and those electors met nationwide yesterday toe formally certify each state's results.

This is all part of the constitutional election process that happens every four years.

It's getting more attention this time around because the results of the 2020 presidential election have been disputed.

Former Vice President Joe Biden won the projected vote on Election Day.

States were expected to certify his Electoral College win on Monday, and those Electoral College votes will be sent to Congress, which will formally count them next month.

So is he officially the president elect?

Some experts say yes that a candidate formally gets that title when the 50 states electoral votes are certified.

But others say that happens when Congress officially counts them.

Either way, Congress will have completed that step on January 6th.

When we produced this show yesterday, though President Donald Trump had not conceded the election, he says he's the rightful winner, though he has authorized the government to start the transition process to the next administration.

The lawsuits that the president and his supporters have filed have not been successful in overturning the results from several states, and yesterday those states moved forward in making their results official.

In the United States, the popular vote doesn't directly determine who becomes president.

Under the Electoral College system, each state gets a certain number of electors based on how many representatives it has in Congress, and those people cast the official votes for president.

Historically, electors have overwhelmingly voted for the candidate who won the popular vote in their state, but they can stray.

If they do, they're called faithless electors.

Faithless electors have never changed the outcome of an election, but they have popped up over the years.

For example, in 2016, 10 electors didn't vote for the candidate who won their state.

There are 33 states with laws that require electors to vote for a pledge candidate, but most of them don't have any penalty for voting another way.

Some states impose a fine.

Some cancel the vote and replace the elector, and some count it as a criminal charge.

In July 2020 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that states could enforce these laws.

10-second trivia!

Which of these nations is the only one that's covered partially by the Amazon rainforest?

Colombia, Panama, Chile or Paraguay?

On this list, Colombia is the only nation that's touched by the Amazon rainforest.

[Archaeologists found paintings showing humans living with mastodons and other giant animals.]

[The researchers say the images were likely painted around 12,600 to 11,800 years ago.]

[The paintings are located on rock walls in what is now central Colombia in the Amazon rainforest.]

Clearly, we have an overlap between people on these mega herbivores.

It tells us that this artwork was drawn at that time period.

This is a great chronological marker that these are some of the earliest people.

[The figures were painted over a period of hundreds of years, according to the researchers.]

[They say that local communities knew about the paintings and helped researchers explore them.]

A couple weeks or a couple months maybe.

That's how long we expected to be producing this show from our remote studio when we were sent home in March.

But as the coronavirus pandemic has stuck around, we have more or less settled into a very different workflow.

And one question being asked by people across corporate America and beyond is: how long will this continue?

Some companies tried this long before the pandemic struck.

Yahoo once had a work from home option that the company did away with in 2013, same thing for some IBM workers who were asked to come back to the office in 2017.

But will the changes of 2020 become more permanent even after the pandemic finally goes away?

This was the year working from home went mainstream right around the world.

This was a "how to work from home" video that I made a way back in March.

I thought this might be the way of things for a couple of months.

Wow!

Did I get that wrong?

As we reach the end of 2020 many of us haven't returned to the office.

We're still on Zoom, Skype, WebEx, Slack.

While video conference fatigue has set in for some, others are happy with this new way of working.

Twitter is one company that's embraced the change and is allowing some employees to choose to work from home permanently.

We had about over 80% of our employees working four or five days in the office.

So pretty much full-time in the office, and one very small percentage single digits of people who are working full-time remote, and that's almost flipped.

We've done these surveys coming back out of it.

We have in the single digits people want who want to spend four or five days in the office and much more in terms of almost a third of our workforce wanna be, actually, full-time remote.

Actual productivity has remained pretty steady.

But people's perception is increasing as they figure this out.

Productivity is critical.

90% of workers surveyed in the UK said they would like to continue working from home often or all the time.

However, only 70 percent felt they were as productive or more so.

I think we'll be moving to more hybrid forms of working where people do actually work a lot more from home than they used to before the pandemic.

So it has ushered in a major change.

I think in the landscape, in terms of how we were, where we were.

The shift to remote has had a devastating impact on local economies.

Cafes, bars and shops are reliant on office workers, who may never go back to their offices from 9 to 5, 5 days a week.

Companies could reduce their office space or give up expensive leases altogether.

What was in for many of our clients?

People choosing to work from home, perhaps two, maybe three days a week.

There still is the requirement then of the office, but people will come into it for a different reason.

The great work from home experiment has sparked long-term change in the way that we work.

But it isn't for everyone, whether it's unsuitable home environments, noisy children, or in my case, way with pets.

Some of us will be hoping to get back to the office in 2021.

Crazy to think of 2019 as a simpler time when kids could just walk up to Santa, sit on his lap and get their pictures taken while they told him what they wanted for Christmas.

Now there are masks, face shields, plexi glass, sometimes computer screens between jolly young people and the jolly old elf.

But as everyone involved hopes this is the first and last year for scenes like this, they're still finding creative ways to drum up Christmas magic.

I do have my Merry Christ-mask, so when I'm out and about I could mask up.

And make everybody else feel safe as well.

He's been "ice-olating" in the North Pole for 11 months, now, Santa's ready to get back to business with a little help from his friends.

This year, many of Santa's grottoes are closed due to COVID-19, which means Santa's helpers he kindly step in when he's busy, are having to learn some new skills.

Welcome to a slightly different but still wonderful Santa school.

Santa HQ is an app allowing for zoom chats with Santa.

Very good indeed.

Now what we need to do is just scale it down slightly.

Oh, it's run by the Ministry of Fun, one of the biggest Santa recruitment firms in the UK who see plenty of benefits.

You get to see Santa in his home, get longer with him because normally there's a queue, and there's lots of people that want to see the great man on.

And it's much more personal.

I know it'll be slightly different, but by using video, and all this technology, we can see our family no matter where they are in the world on.

You can see Santa too, now he's Zoom-ready.

Anna Stewart, CNN reporting from Santa's London office in the UK.

One of them says he always wears gloves and uses "Santa-tizer", that's fantastic.

You could say it "sleighs" me.

Now, he probably won't catch coronavirus up on the housetop.

But Mommy better not be caught kissing him because whether you have a white Christmas, a blue Christmas or a Holly Jolly one, "Navi Dad" would be anything but feliz about that.

I'm Carl Azuz for CNN 10.

Pine Forest High School Sounds pretty picturesque, especially this time of year.

Shout out to our viewers in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

We have three shows to go before we wrap up for 2020.